Training the Best

Just got back from flying some night visual navigation hops last night and decided to take some time to post an update.

Things are looking good for selection on Tuesday. As long as the weather holds out, I'll fly the first cruise formation flight tomorrow and then an out and in for the last two cruse form flights. And that will be my last flight in the T-34C.

Most likely, by the time that I come back as an instructor the Navy will have transitioned to the T-6 Texan II. It's about time, the T-34C design is thirty years old now and showing her age. They are still very capable aircraft and are well maintained, but they don't have the bells and whistles of modern aircraft. The GPS is ridiculous, the tiny monochrome screen and four knob design is terrible to use when in flight.

The T-34C does the basics very well, it is a stable and maneuverable aircraft, but when you get to the later phases of primary and especially when you take it on the road, it gets cumbersome. When you are flying around with the civilians, you do your talking over the VHF radio, which the T-34C was not originally equipped with. So they installed one on the right lower console near the back so that the pilot has to almost turn sideways in his seat to change frequencies on the damn thing. And beyond that the display is incredibly small so it's really hard to read. I have no idea why they couldn't put the controls on the dashboard where they'd be easy to access.

Forms have gone really well, I have thoroughly enjoyed them. I picked up the eye and touch necessary to fly good, tight formation early and have had a lot of fun since. Civilian pilots almost never get to fly formation; it is almost exclusively a military thing. Yet another bonus to doing this flight thing through the military.

We flew our safe for solo checkride on Friday morning and it all went really well until we decided to come home. When I checked the automated weather service over the radio, the winds were being called as coming from 360 at 8 knots but the active runway was still 13. The runway heading is the magnetic direction that it points rounded off to the nearest tenth and you always want to land into the wind. We have runways more suitable to a 360 wind here in Corpus, we have 35 and two 31s (left and right), but for some reason tower still had us landing on 13. Eight knots isn't so bad, but it's not ideal.

So I flew in course rules and proceeded for the break. I kissed off my partner and rolled the plane into a 45 degree angle of bank turn to begin the break. In hindsight I remember that the plane slowed down a lot more rapidly than normal and this should have clued me in to just how stiff the winds were. (Since you head back up the runway in the downwind leg for landing, I was heading 310, almost straight into the wind.)

I hit the end of the runway on the downwind and started to roll in for landing. I made my call to inform tower that I was at the 180 with my gear down and locked and they responded with "winds variable at 8, cleared to land." Just in passing, I thought to myself "variable my ass, you guys have the wrong runway active and you just don't want to change it", but I didn't think an 8 knot wind would be too difficult.

Things quickly started to go bad. I had put in my normal angle of bank to get to the runway and I was not turning fast enough. I could see the runway centerline coming to meet me and I did not yet have my nose pointed down the runway; I was still in the turn. I turned harder but down low with the gear down we are limited to 30 degrees angle of bank. I locked the plane in at 30 but it just wasn't enough. I was rapidly drifting right of centerline and since the wind was a tailwind I was very high, almost 650 feet when I needed to be at 450.

Since I was now very high and drifting dangerously close to 13 Right I decided that it was time to wave off. No one wants to wave off, especially when you are in a form flight and your partner is behind you, but there is no reason to try and save a bad landing. I powered up, pulled the flaps up, and made the call that no one likes to make; "Ranger 814 is waving off."

My ego was quickly mended because no sooner than I had leveled off at 500 feet I heard my wingman over the radio "Ranger 815 is waving off." I found out after the flight that they had seen what happened to me and the instructor told him to turn hard early but he still was not able to save the approach. My wingman's instructor came over the radio and told tower "That's a dead tail wind, tower." They got the message, because while I was downwind for my second try they alerted everyone in the pattern and on the ground that they were going to switch the runway to 31.

The second approach was a lot better because I knew what the winds really were and was able to compensate for it. I flew further down the runway on downwind and turned hard early. My instructor told me that he was checking the GPS groundspeed readout as I rolled in for the landing and my indicated airspeed was 95 knots but my speed over the ground was 110 knots. That means that if the wind really was coming from 360 it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 23 knots, or if it was coming from 310 (a 100% tailwind) then it was 15knots. Needless to say we didn't make the first taxiway.

The solo was pretty cool, but it was not standard at all. Ninety percent of flight school we use runways 13 left and right because the winds are always out of the southeast coming in off the gulf. And for all five of the formation flights we flew prior to solo, we had used 13. The active runway was still 31 since we had only been on the ground for about an hour and I was very rusty on my course rules for 31. I felt like a first month contact student, sweating a runway change and wishing they would just change it back to 13 where I was comfortable. But after a quick review of the course rules book, I had it down.

We flew out to the working area and did our thing without incident. The coolest part was coming back in over the beach. There were a lot of people on the beach and we flew over in a three ship parade formation. Now I know that people around here see us fly over all the time, but I fly these damn things and I still think it is cool to look up and see two planes in formation, let alone three. Maybe some kid down there was inspired. Seems to be a theme in my writing. Oh well.

I flew last night for some night navigation training in the local area. We are supposed to get at least one night navigation flight on cross country but since we got stuck in Birmingham overnight and had to fly home the next morning I didn't get one in. Operations is dead set on me selecting on Tuesday so they scheduled both of my night nav flights last night to get them out of the way.

There are two night navigation routes around here, one that circles to the south of Corpus Christi and one that circles to the north. Since it was Saturday night and my instructor didn't want to fly any longer than we had to, he proposed that we cut one checkpoint out of both routes, combine them, and complete both on one flight. I had no arguments; flying at night is a lot of fun, but when you're at the end of a twenty flight two week stint and it's Saturday night all you want to do is get it over with.

We took off out of Corpus International and flew over NAS Corpus Christi to start the route, but we first made a stop over my instructor's house. He had just had some concrete poured and wanted to see what it looked like from the air so he took the controls and did some 60 degree angle of bank circles over his house. Sometimes it's good to be a pilot. My onwing used to enjoy flying over his house on the Sunrise transition and chopping the power to idle when directly overhead because his wife said it got "really loud" when he did that. I can see myself doing that.

Night navigating here in south Texas is actually pretty easy; there is nothing else out there. You fly over once cluster of lights, turn to your next heading, and clear as day is the next cluster of flights and your next destination. That's how you navigate at night; by city lights and airport beacons. Every airport has a green and white rotating beacon that marks its position at night and they are very clear at night.

My instructor spent most of the night talking over the ICS about college, OCS, TBS, life in the Navy, whatever came to mind. The flying was not especially challenging for me and had to be excruciatingly boring for him. All in all it was fun.

So now I've got today off to study for cruse forms. We'll fly in the local area tomorrow and hopefully go on the road Tuesday to College Station or Houston. A good way to end primary.

// posted by Josh @ 8/19/2006 11:09:00 PM