Training the Best

Yeah, I had to do it. The plates from Virginia have expired, and besides that Virginia requires yearly inspections (also expired) and I'm not driving 1500 miles and 30 hours to get a Virginia inspection. Couldn't you imagine that? Getting all the way there and when you walk up to the counter they tell you your insurance card is expired? Wow, I would be pissed.

So I got my car inspected here in Texas (an hour long odyssey) and ventured down to the Nueces County Courthouse. I didn't get there until 4:40 and the place closes at 5pm, so I wasn't sure if I was going to get my tags today. I got to the window at 4:45 and the lady at the window pointed out that my insurance card said Florida on it and Florida's liability limits don't meet Texas's requirements. Game over? Hardly.

The lady behind the counter was really nice, but didn't have faith that my insurance company would be able to fax a new insurance card in time. I had faith. I'm not going to start doing commercials for USAA, but they are pretty damn good in the phone customer support arena. After a short telephone call and no wait time a fax was on the way.

Then yet another nice lady helped me out at the next window. I couldn't get over all this prompt and polite customer service. Does this happen in other states? North Carolina DMV is like the second layer of hell compared to this place. Just two quick forms and I was ready to pay up and get my plates.

The damage? $186! Twenty bucks for something called a "terp" fee, $13 for a title application fee, $90 for sales tax, and $50.50 for a windshield sticker! It's not even a cool sticker! It's just a colored piece of paper with some contact paper on the back of it so you can stick it to the inside of your windshield. It'll all be worth it when I don't have to pay state income tax anymore. Since my car is registered in Texas and Texas has no income tax, I can become a legal resident and don't have to pay North Carolina a damn thing! That'll put $193 a month back into my pocket. Yeehaw!

Notice the stickers in the lower right hand corner of the windshield. The $50 registration sticker is on top and the inspection sticker is on bottom.

While I was in Houston this weekend I got to see the Astros play the Rockies at Minute Maid park. That makes four major league parks I've been to so far and only twenty six to go. The list so far:

Municipal Stadium, home of the Cleveland Indians (now a pile of rubble)

RFK Stadium, temporary home of the Washington Nationals

Camden Yards, home of the Orioles, one of the most beautiful parks in the major league.

Minute Maid Park, home of the Houston Astros.

So considering that one of the four is gone now and one is only a temporary home, I guess that makes twenty eight to go.

The vast open nothingness of Texas. There's a reason they put flight school out here; there's nothing for us to hit.

JT once told me that she felt claustrophobic in the east because of the time she had spend in Texas. When I first drove out here from Pensacola I was at first a little shocked by how open this place was; being able to see the horizon in all directions is a little strange.

I wish I had some digital copies of my pictures from CAX in the Mojave desert, that is the closest I have ever seen to this place. But there were mountains five miles to the west which obstructed the view. To the east 50 miles away was Big Bear, a 7000' snow capped peak in California. It sucked to be sweating your ass off in 120 degrees and see a snow capped mountain in the distance.

I learned a new trick last week; spins. A spin is a difficult thing to explain because the only way I know how to explain it is in aviation language. It is a condition in which a stalled wing in combination with a yawing motion of the nose translates into a nose low autorotation.

For residents of North Carolina I can explain it this way: remember those seeds that fall from the maple trees? A spin looks just like that, the nose of the aircraft being the bulbous part of the seed and the tail being the wing part. There are two kinds of spins too; erect and inverted. In an erect spin the canopy is pointed towards the inside of the spin. In an inverted spin the canopy is pointed to the outside of the spin. We are not allowed to do intentional inverted spins because while you are in an inverted spin you experience negative 1 G, which is disorienting and may easily result in more negative Gs which really start to hurt as the blood rushes to your head. Remember hanging upside down from a tree? That's one negative G. Another concern is that the T-34C is only rated to -2.3 Gs while it can take 4.5Gs on the positive side.

So to get yourself into a spin, and yes we want to get ourselves into a spin; there is a fairly simple procedure. Starting at about 9,000' above the ground, you cut the power and bring the nose up to 30 degrees nose up. When you get rudder shakers (an electronic warning to the pilot that he is about to stall the plane) you lead with a little bit of rudder in the direction you want to spin. Soon thereafter the plane fully stalls and the nose starts to drop. Put your foot to the floor in the direction you want to spin and pull the stick back to your stomach.

Now the fun starts. The aircraft quickly starts to spin and descend towards the earth at 9-12,000 feet per minute (150 to 200' per second). The spin is not very violent in the T-34, it only rotates 120 to 180 degrees per second, but when you are trying to read gauges while you are being tossed around and the entire world is spinning past your cockpit it feels a lot faster.

We train to recover from spins because they are a very real possibility if we depart from controlled flight when doing aerobatics, but just as important is recognizing if you are really in a spin. If you are not actually in a spin and you apply the control inputs to recover from a spin you will only make the situation worse, so there are four instruments you have to look at first.

First and foremost is the altimeter. If you see 5,000' or less it's time to get the fuck out. You are descending at a very rapid pace and recovering from a spin takes a couple thousand feet. Also necessary to consider is how long it will take you to open the canopy, release your belts, disconnect your oxygen mask and radio cords, and dive clear of the aircraft. The manual says that this will take as long as 15 seconds and at 5,000' in a spin you only have 25 seconds before hitting the ground.

Next is the Angle Of Attack gauge; if it reads 30 units you are in an erect spin, three units and you are in an inverted spin.

After that is airspeed. 80-100 knots means erect spin, 0 means inverted. This is not an actual indication of your speed through the air; the error is due to the location of the airspeed probe; on the bottom of the wing. In an erect spin this probe isn't getting the normal amount of air, in an inverted spin this probe is shielded by the wing and seeing no airflow.

Then the turn needle, this tells you which way you are spinning. Which ever way the needle is pointing; apply full rudder in the opposite direction along with a bit of forward stick and the spinning should stop. Now you are nose down and the airspeed is building up quickly. Look up to the horizon, level the wings and pull. You'll pull between two and three Gs while recovering from this nose low attitude. Level the plane out, climb back up, and repeat. I actually really enjoy spins; they are a lot of fun. Some guys get sick during or after them and some just don't like them but I love them.

Most of the time you lose about 3,000' of altitude in a spin. If you start at 9,000' that means that you recover by 6,000'. This makes the instructors a little nervous and they are very quick to correct you if you are slow about applying the proper control inputs. I guess I would be too if my life was in the hands of a guy with less than twenty hours of flight experience.

So I'm back at it this week, hoping the weather holds out. I was supposed to fly this morning at 0700 but as I was driving in for my 0530 brief my instructor called and cancelled. I can't blame him, there were thunderstorms in the area and the radar showed no signs of clearing in the near future.

Yeah, I know it's been almost a month since I updated and the last thing I posted was that I was med down. Well, I've been med up for a while now and doing some flying as the clouds allow. We've had a pesky layer of clouds that seems to hover between 1500 and 2500' which really screws with our routes out to the training areas. We usually lose half the day due to these clouds which are present most of the morning, dissipate around noon, and come back in the late afternoon. Apparently this is the nature of spring in Corpus; once the heat of the summer gets here it won't be such an issue.

So I was sent to a civilian x-ray clinic to have a CT scan of my kidneys done. I was expecting something nice and clean and high tech, but I should have known better considering the fact that the Navy was paying for this. It was next to one of the major hospitals here, so I wouldn't call the area ghetto, but it was in close proximity to the ghetto. The waiting room was half Mexican and half bitter old white ladies. I, unlike most of the other people there, had shown up on time for my appointment so I was called right away.

The CT machine is this huge white circle with a bed in front of it on a motorized track that slowly passes you through the center of the circle. You are supposed to hold your breath the whole time but the damn thing takes forever for one pass! Three passes and an ordinary x-ray later, I was out of there. A mountain of a woman had appeared in the waiting room and as I walked through she eyeballed me like a hippo eyeballing its next meal. I was happy to get the hell out of there.

So the CT was on Friday and on Monday I got the call from Doc Slattery that the CT scan showed that the anomaly on the x-ray was just a calcification somewhere else in the body, completely harmless. I picked up my up chit on Tuesday morning and I was back in business.

Flying is not like riding a bike, it is something that you have to do on a regular basis or you lose your touch. You forget the procedures; you forget the way things are supposed to look and feel on the landing approach. The Navy knows this and they have a procedure in place. If you have been out of the cockpit for 7 to 13 days you are granted an optional warm-up, meaning that you will fly the next flight but if you goon it up the grades don't count. If it's been 14 days or more, you get a mandatory warm-up and an optional warm-up. The mandatory is a repeat of the last flight you flew and the grades do not count.

So I was supposed to fly a mandatory warm-up of my last flight C4004, but the instructor who picked me up of standby was confused and insisted that it was an optional warm-up of C4101, the next flight. And to make matters worse, the instructor was Lt. Valadez, one of the reputed "screamers" in the squadron. All instructors will correct you quickly if you screw up, but most of them are nice about it. The majority are not screamers, but every squadron has a few.

To make matters worse, this was going to be a hotseat. Instead of walking out to the flight line and doing my normal pre-flight routine followed by strapping in, starting, and taxiing to the runway, I was going to meet my instructor at the hot spot and swap seats with his student from his first flight with the engine still running. He came back earlier than he had told me, so I was not ready when the call came over the radio. I had to rush to get my gear on and then get out to the hot spot where he was waiting. Grr.

Strapping in takes forever and instead of being able to calmly go through my checklist to ensure everything is set up properly, I had to rush through that too. This resulted in me missing that two switches were not where they needed to be and making the call to ground control on the VHF radio (supposed to be the UHF) on the instructor common frequency. Oh well.

From there on things got worse. My mind was racing from the chaos of getting in the plane and from how long it had been since I had been in the front seat. I screwed all kinds of things up and Valadez started screaming. "What the hell are you doing Greer, look at your airspeed, what the fuck?" We did four touch and goes at Corpus and then proceeded to Waldron for a few more. As we headed to Waldron he informed me that "wherever your head is, you'd better pull it out of there." I was flying like crap, but his yelling didn't help.

At Waldron, more screaming followed as I continued to screw things up. I was getting better on each pass, but there was always something new for him to scream about. Finally he said that he wanted me to fly a no flap landing followed by a full flap landing and he wouldn't say a word. I actually flew those two pretty well so we moved on to power failures.

I had never flown any power failures before, so I was not supposed to be flying them on a mandatory warm-up but that didn't stop him. After a few quick demos I was at the controls and he was randomly pulling the power on me. At altitudes from 4000' to 800', he pulled the power and I had to get us properly set up for an emergency landing. It wasn't that hard, but every time I didn't know exactly what to do immediately the yelling started again. Finally, after an hour and a half of this abuse, we went home.

In the debrief, he was actually a little complimentary. He said that my flying improved a lot throughout the flight and that by the end I was doing pretty well. Despite the browbeating that I took, I think the experience was a good one. I now know how to handle a screamer when I get one on a graded flight. No matter how bad the screaming got, I refused to give up and I got through it. It's not my preferred way to learn, but it is the nature of the beast.