Training the Best

Yeah, sounds like a good time, right? Not at all. Well the penetration was kinda fun but I'll get to that.

Double pumped is an expression we have for when the squadron schedules you for two graded events in one day; usually two flights or two simulator events. It sucks. There is a lot of studying that goes into each event and when you only find out the day before at 6pm that you are going to do two simulator events the next day you have to kick the studying into high gear, losing necessary sleep for the two events. Not only did I get double pumped, I got double pumped on BI3 and 4, two of the busiest and hardest BI sims. On top of that, this was Friday and the rest of the squadron had a half day because of a tie cutting ceremony for the students who had recently soloed. This leads me into the big blue weenie.

I kinda made this one up from a Marine Corps expression, the big green weenie. Any time the Corps screws a marine by making him work on the weekend, screwing up his pay, sending him to the worst parts of the country and world, it is referred to as betting the big green weenie; being screwed by the Corps. Well I'm not under the command of the Marine Corps; I'm under Navy command so it's the big blue weenie.

I finished my first block of flights on Tuesday and moved on to the Basic Instrument phase of flight school. The BI phase consists of seven simulator events and three flights flown in the back seat with the hood over your cockpit. In this phase, we start to learn how to fly an aircraft solely on the instruments, with no outside reference. This is how you would fly if you had to fly through the weather and clouds obscured your vision. It's a big part of being a military pilot, because we can't stop flying missions just because of a few clouds. It is incredibly hard to do at first.

Instead of being able to look outside at this huge horizon and tell which way your aircraft is pointed, you now have to look at a collection of ten gauges that all tell you something different about your plane in a different way. And they don't all read the way you would expect. The attitude gyro shows you the position of the ground, so if you are banking left it actually dips to the right. On top of that gauge is your angle of bank index which shows you how many degrees of bank you have but in the opposite direction you have it in. If you are banking left, the index deflects to the right. But right below that is the RMI which shows you your magnetic heading. This works in the direction you would think it would. If you want to go to a heading of 090 and it's to the right on the gauge you bank right. AAHHH! Why can't they just make a little plane gauge?

To do your seven simulator events, you go to building 89, the simulator building: the swallower of souls. There are seven cold, lifeless T-34 simulator cockpits waiting there with about thirty old men who combine forces and conspire to destroy student naval aviators' confidence and take their dreams of flying tactical jets. The old men for the most part are nice guys, but they don't let even the smallest slip up go unpunished. Even a small slip up is noted on the grade sheets. Well for the most part they are nice guys. Some are assholes, but I digress.

BI (basic instrument) sims are an exercise in frustration. In your dark pitching and rolling little capsule you must balance on what seems like the head of a needle. No control movement goes unpunished. You trim the rudder, the elevator, and the ailerons until you think you have it stable but if you look away for a second you find out that it wasn't as stable as you thought. You look back and you are diving, climbing, or rolling out of control.

Your instructor, who is grading your every move, is watching a computer screen which actually gives him more information than your gauges. His are bigger and in some cases digital so when you think you have your torque set at 550 ftlbs, he can see that you actually have 563ftlbs set. For every maneuver there are graded parameters, you have to stay within a certain limitation of airspeed, altitude, and heading to get a passing grade. A pass at this stage is a 3, an even tighter set or parameters gets you a 4, and even tighter gets you a 5. As the sims progress, a 3 is no longer a pass and you must get 4s.

This balancing act requires what we call a good "scan", meaning that your eyes never fixate on one gauge, they bounce from one to the next, taking in information, combining all of what you have seen to form a mental picture of what the plane is doing. If your airspeed is high and your altitude low, raise the nose. If your altitude is high and your airspeed high, cut power and raise the nose. If your heading is drifting left, trim the rudder right and you are probably going to have to reduce power and trim up elevator. There are over a dozen possible fluctuations with related fixes and they must come naturally, without pause, because the longer you wait, the worse things get.

All of this constant attention, analysis, and action makes for a very tiring hour and twenty minutes. With the canopy closed it gets pretty hot in there too, making things even worse. Each time I get out of the sim I am covered in sweat and I am mentally exhausted. So it really sucks when you have to go another one only two hours later. You feel like you're ready for the second one but about a half hour into it you start making stupid little mistakes and the frustration sets in. Before long, you're looking for the ejection handle to get the fuck out of that thing.

Penetration is a pretty cool maneuver in which you drop a whole lot of altitude in a short time. In IMC conditions, there are clouds which obscure your view of the ground and other planes, so you need to do this in a predictable manner when ground control clears you. The best way to do this is with a rapidly descending turn. Chop the throttle to idle and drop the nose. Let your airspeed accelerate to 180 knots and hold it. This maneuver will give you a 4,000 foot per minute descent rate and a pretty steep nose down angle. In a short amount of time you descend from 13,000 feet to 3,000. The simulator has motion, so it approximates what it will feel like in the plane, but I can't wait to do it for real.

So I survived my first week of BI sims without too much damage. My grades weren't what I was hoping for, but I know my maneuvers and I've got a bit of time to study this weekend for my two sims on Monday. Unfortunately, that means I'm going to be studying on my birthday. Oh well, it won't be the worst birthday ever, that title belongs to the birthday that I spent on Parris Island. Man, I can't wait to get back to the plane.

// posted by Josh @ 4/08/2006 11:15:00 AM