"Dont forget - the next Saturday isn't for another 7 days"

Got to sleep in until 12 noon today and it was great! Housekeeping knocked around 8 am so that wasn't cool, but you could here all down the hallway "NO! thanks..."

After lunch, I spent about 6 hours in our flight room studying with other people from the class and preparing our first formal briefing for Monday, it was back down to dinner. And after that, you guessed it - back to the books! By the time I got down "chair-flying" in our cockpit trainers, it was already 10 pm and ready to settle down in my room. So another day at the Doss cave without getting outside at all. There's not really any benches or places to hang out outside since its just a parking lot on one side and the airport on the other. So if you're outside, you're either running on the track or on your way to town. Tomorrow I'll try to get on the track, but we'll see how that goes since we're having a class meeting in the afternoon and waking up early on a Sunday is a joke.

Mondays when we start our full blown formal briefings and infamous "stand-ups" where they call a person at random to stand up in front of the room at attention. They tell us the reading on a few gauges and then say "your airplane" and we have to troubleshoot and fix the problem from that point all the way until we're on the ground and everythings shut down. So tons of rote memorization and thinking under pressure. It's when what they call the "butt up - brain off" switch comes into play. But its supposed to be ran very similar to how it actually goes at UPT (that's Undergraduate Pilot Training if you recall - what I'm doing at Sheppard in October). So all this preparation should be good. Especially since IFS (Initial Flight Screening) is still in it's early stages where not every UPT class has had every student go through IFS. So when I go through UPT, I'll have other people in my class who haven't had any flight experience and the instructors will have to make sure to start at the basics with them (and allow the rest of us time to catch a quick breath).

There's 7 other guys here from my class at ENJJPT (Euro Nato Joint Jet Pilot Training aka UPT at Sheppard AFB) so it's been good getting to know them better. Everyone else in our class is great too, I've been really impressed how people who have never been in a plane already know as much as I did when I was ready for my private pilot license and it's only been like 4 days of training. Majoring in Aviation Human Factors was an outstanding choice in my path to being an AF pilot. I highly recommend it...

Food here is pretty good. They've got a grill for burgers, fries, etc made to order. The only catchy part is the lunch and dinner is the same thing so you have to make sure you don't get all the good stuff at lunch and leave nothing for dinner. All you can eat and free by the way, with to-go boxes. Good stuff. And the staff here is uber-friendly. You can be walking down the hall minding your business out of uniform and they go "Sir, good afternoon, how are you today- Excellent sir! Have a wonderful day!". It's so peppy that you have no choice but to be at least a little cheered up. And the whole place is very well kept. If there was only some more outside or windows in the rooms, it would be good to go.