Training the Best

Okay, I know I promised that the blog would get more exciting, but I've been pretty busy in my first week so I didn't have time to update until now.

The inspection was crap, a huge waste of time for us. We stood out in the 40 degree windy Pensacola morning for forty minutes before an Air Force captain came out to inspect us. He didn't even stop in front of the marines, I don't know if he would have known if something on our uniforms was out of place if he did. He did, however, stop in front of the Navy and Air Force students and reamed a few of them for dirty ribbons, poorly fitting uniforms, etc.

Then a morning of briefs followed, each more boring than the last. I set off as quickly as possible for Atlanta and didn't think about API at all that weekend. I went to Bela's company holiday party, and that was an adventure. I went in my dress blues because my suit didn't really fit well and I didn't have time to have it tailored. I didn't really want to wear it, because it attracts attention and I didn't really want the attention, but that's all I had that was appropriate for the occasion. I was accosted by more than one middle aged (married) woman who wanted to take me home and wanted to tell me how hot she thought men in uniform are. It was cute the first time, annoying the other seven. Oh well, blame it on the booze. The funny thing is that I think Bela actually got a little jealous. She'll deny it forever, but I know.

Monday of week one started with the Navy physical readiness test. Pushups, sit-ups, and a 1.5 mile run. We lost one squid because he hurt his ankle or something on the run. I don't know exactly what happened, but he was sitting on the side of the track holding his ankle after only two laps around the 1/4 mile track. Jeez, how embarrassing.

Lots and lots of classes followed; aerodynamics and weather. Every day includes some time in the pool, swimming laps, treading water with flight suit, boots, and flight harness on, whatever they can come up with. Each day starts at 0600 or 0630, so I have to get up at 0450 or 0520 in order to have the time to wake up, shower, shave, get something to eat and drive the 30 minutes to work. It sucks getting back onto the military sleep schedule.

For the most part the classes are not that hard. There is a lot of information, but nothing that is blowing my mind. A lot of our education is just enough information for us to fly planes, not become an aerospace engineer or a meteorologist. Coriolis force, for example. For some reason, the earth's rotation causes winds flowing out of a high pressure zone to take a 90 degree turn and blow parallel to the isobar lines. Why does this happen you ask? Don't worry about it lieutenant, just know that it does. Since I'm being tested on this stuff, that's fine by me, but it still bugs me that I don't know why something so strange happens.

So now I'm on vacation for two weeks and don't need to worry about any of this for a while, we will take our Aero 1 test on the Wednesday after we get back and Weather on Thursday. As our aerodynamics instructor told us, we can either have the best Aero 1 grades ever or the worst, depending on whether we choose to study on break or not. I plan to do some studying and work on my swimming endurance while I'm here. I've got to swim a mile in a flight suit in our second week back. Definitely not looking forward to that one.

// posted by Josh @ 12/17/2005 10:25:00 PM