Training the Best

After thirty seven long days, I finally finished the Radio Instruments phase of flight school with my I4390 check ride. Even though it was almost 1130 at night I was so happy I called Bela and my sister. Hopefully not waking either one of them up. Sorry guys, I just had to tell someone.

For the past five weeks I have studied my ass off and gotten my ass kicked daily in flights and simulators while my room mate has chilled on the couch and played video games. He's been in PAs and Forms (formation flight), which are a lot less study intensive. Now the tables are turned as I start back up with PAs tomorrow and he will likely start RIs this Friday.

This has not been a fun part of flight school. It is a lot of fun learning all of this cool stuff and actually taking my aircraft on the road to fly with the big boys, but the pace at which we have to learn this crap is ridiculous. At the beginning of the initial six days of classes, Instrument Ground School, our instructor informed us that we were going to learn the equivalent of a semester college class in the five days of class we had. Friday was the final exam so that didn't really count towards the learning.

It is really amazing how much I have learned in the past month. My roommate has to ask me to translate when I talk about the flights much like my friends and family do all the time. I remember hearing people talking about RI stuff in the ready room when I was in contacts and having no idea what the hell they were talking about. Now I'm the one speaking greek. That part is cool, realizing how much I have learned in such a short time. When I started this phase of flight school I couldn't tell you what the hell an approach plate was. Now I can explain everything on the plate and even shoot the approach.

The final event is the I4390 flight. The I designates that it is an instrument flight and any 4390 flight is a "check ride" in which an instructor quizzes you and challenges you to see if you really know all that you are supposed to. The briefs are twice as long because he spends most of it drilling you with questions about the tiniest details pertaining to the flight. Then the flight is peppered with questions about limitations, tolerances, rules, regulations, etc. There is also extra pressure because if you fail the flight you immediately go to an initial progress check flight with the XO or CO which is one step away from being attrited from the flight program.

My instructor, Lt. Temkin, is known as a tough grader and a real pain on the checkrides. He has been the lowest grader on average for the last two quarters. A fellow marine, 2ndLt Weisman, flew his 4390 with him on Wednesday night and I had occasion to talk to him on Thursday afternoon and get some gouge from him. That came in handy because there was a particular question that Temkin asked that I would not have known had Weisman not told me about in advance.

Since I am in need of night hours, we were scheduled to brief at 1900 and I was the only one in the ready room. Lt. Temkin walked in and joked that I must be his student because I was the only one there. He asked if I was an instruments expert and I replied that I didn't know if I was an expert, but I knew enough to be dangerous. He laughed a little.

I tried something new this time. In the past I have dreaded check rides, not slept well before them, been restless the entire day before. This time I told myself that I was good at this stuff, I know what I am doing, and I was going to take him for a ride just like any other RI flight. In the past the brief was my downfall; if I didn't have a good brief it would kill my confidence and that would cloud my mind for the flight, resulting in a lot of mental mistakes. I decided that wasn't going to happen this time.

Temkin laid it on me in the brief. Some of my classmates described the I4390 as a walk in the park, just another RI flight, and some had even knocked out their 4390s on their cross countries. Technically they are not allowed to do that, but they did. Temkin asked me questions about rules, airspace, the IFR charts, lost communication procedures, you name it. I didn't know everything, but I knew where to look for the answer when I didn't. In the past that may have rattled me but I wasn't going to let it get to me this time. I kept talking to him and kept establishing that I was confident and ready. I think that did a lot for the rest of the flight. So much of flight school has involved psychology. From dealing with the crotchety old men in the simulator building to fooling instructors into thinking that I know more than I really know, my psychology classes have served me well.

As we taxied out to the run up area, Temkin sprang the question on me that I think was his ace in the hole. There is a point on the taxiway that is intended for pilots to check their TACAN receiver for accuracy. I think it was mentioned once in IGS and I hadn't studied it since. But thanks to Weisman's tip I knew exactly what it was and the tolerances. I played it up, pausing a little for some of the numbers like I was trying to recall them. I didn't want to tip him off completely, but I think I rained on his parade by knowing the answer. He didn't say much after that.

The flight went very well; I flew smoothly with very few mistakes. Because it was 9 o'clock at night, there was very little radio traffic to compete with and the air was smooth. It was great. Temkin is one of those instructors that have to have something to complain about, and since my flying was good he had to pick out nitpicky things to complain about, at one point complaining because my airspeed was 4 knots off. It wasn't really a mistake, I was descending to correct a slight altitude deviation, but I let him have his little victory.

It is especially satisfying as a student to see an instructor screw up. We don't normally take the approaches in for a touch and go because we are flying from the back seat and aren't allowed to land the plane form the back seat as students. Temkin chose to take the controls at the end of each approach so that he could get some night touch and goes in. On the first one he pulled the nose up too hard and got rudder shakes, a warning that he was close to stalling the aircraft. I laughed to myself a little.

The final approach I shot was a PAR (precision approach radar). A controller on the ground looks at a special radar scope and gives you constant guidance as to your position left or right of course and above or below glideslope. The radar is precise enough to take you all the way down to only 100' above the ground with zero visibility. I have to say my heart would be beating hard if the altimeter read 150' and I still hadn't broken out of the clouds, but we can do it.

We had requested two PARs just in case I didn't do well on the first one, and since I had done well Temkin took the second. When you are on a PAR and doing well, all the controller says is "on glideslope, on course" over and over again. It's music to a pilot's ears. That was pretty much all I heard while I was flying my PAR. Such was not the case for Lt. Temkin. He started 100' high, was not on airspeed on the descent, and required a lot more course and glideslope corrections than I had. He was never unsafe and landed just fine, but I had done it better than he had. That made me smile.

During our debrief he of course harped on the things I had screwed up, but he couldn't take away from me that I had flown it well. That felt good, but the part that really felt good was having the weight of RIs off my shoulders. If I make it to jet school I'll have even more RIs to do and will have to do them three times as fast but that's neither here nor there. For now they are done!

// posted by Josh @ 8/06/2006 04:42:00 PM