Monday, May 08, 2006
Sorry, been busy for a while.
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.
