"Hog gimme one"

The last couple of weeks of pilot training have been a whole lot of ups and downs (more so than usual!). For a week, we had afternoon go's and the thunderstorms kept rolling in right during our time to fly. So after a whole lot of down time for everyone, we got thrown back onto the schedule at full speed. For my first ride after being down for 7 days, I did an advanced contact profile that included going to the high areas for spins and aerobatic practice. The combination of not flying in a while, being in the high areas where your airspeed and altitude is just constantly bleeding off, and just having a crappy day, I failed the sortie. I debriefed all the items with my IP, took a chug of water, and then briefed up with the same IP to fly the sortie over. I cleaned it up in the second go but it still was rough. That set the pace for my next couple advanced contact flights. I can do all the maneuvers, but I'm lacking a whole lot of finesse.

In the past week, we've also started heavy into formation. Formation flying is an awesome experience, sort of a big step into becoming a military pilot. It's crazy to see another plane so close, it's a lot of fun to know you're flying a few feet away from your bud, and it takes a LOT of practice. At times, I feel like I'm starting flying all over again. And not having smooth hands with the jet (which has been a trend for me lately) causes a shitty time for everybody the whole way. But the past two days, I've double turned formation and gotten in a lot of good training. On the other hand, in three more rides, I'm supposed to go out solo on an IP's wing and I definitely am not up to that level yet.

With double turning and doing a lot of new type of flying in the last few days, I've also ran into some other "new experiences" of flying. In my civilian time, I can pretty well say that my only close to "scary" experience was when I took my first solo ever and didn't latch the door closed properly. So as soon as I got up to pattern altitude, air started gushing in everywhere and I couldn't hear any of the radios. Up until the point where I looked over and so that it the door was just barely cracked open, I thought I had all sorts of system failures. So no big deal at the end of the day. But on Monday, I actually said the E-word over the radios in real life. I was doing an advanced contact sortie and the first thing we noticed in the chain of events was that when we got into the jet, the total fuel was about 100 pounds lower than normal (usually 2000, it read 1900). I figured it was just because maintenance didn't fill it up all the way. And as we taxied, the guage fluctuated up to around 1950. We took off and started the departure as normal. Along the way, we had to level off for ATC/traffic, but then we started our climb soon after. After about 5 minutes, the fuel was reading between 1750 and 1850. On every flight, we do a fuel check when it gets between 1720 and 1820. So I did the fuel check and noticed that there was about a 100 pound imbalance between the wings (160 is our maximum imbalance). I figured it was probably because we had just leveled off and started another climb so the fuel was getting sloshed around a lot. I opted to check it again later once we leveled off at altitude. What I didn't notice at that point (and the IP did) was that by doing some quick mental math, the gage was telling us that we about 800 pounds in the center tank (which only holds 600 pounds). So the IP did another fuel check while I flew, and at this point I noticed that it had dropped to about 1600-1700 now and that was huge red flag. The IP asked what I thought the problem was, I proposed either a gage malfunction or some sort of problem with the proportioner pump (which the IP agreed with). We doubted a fuel leak since there wasn't anything spewing out the back of the plane and we couldn't smell any fumes. Either way, losing fuel is bad news so the IP let me keep it for the recovery. I declared emergency and ran the short checklist. Once we got close to the pattern, the IP took it for the landing (they're required). We landed and taxied off the runway where the fire trucks were waiting. We told them everything appeared to be in safe condition (no fuel leaks / fire hazard), so we terminated the emergency taxied back, and wrote it up to maintenance. It was definitely a good training experience to fly through a real emergency (regardless of how big or little the threat actually was). There's always a little debate between what we do in real life vs. a stand-up practice emergency procedure in the flight room (mainly, that we always say we'll do an emergency ground egress on the runway in the standups, which hardly ever gets performed in real life).

This week brought two more close encounters. The first was in the morning on Monday when the weather was deteriorating (just low clouds) and we were going around the traffic pattern to land. There was quite a bit of other traffic so we were clearing outside for everybody as much as we could and listening up on the radios. But as we got ready to make our turn from outside downwind to 90-to-initial, I caught another T-37 at 2 o'clock passing across our nose to the left probably 200-400 feet away. I naturally popped the throttles back to idle, put the speed brake out, and pitched up as soon as I saw him but by the time I did that really, he was already passed off to the left. Both the IP and I never saw this guy until that point, even though we figured out that he was just 500 ft or so to our front right of us for the last couple minutes on a parallel course. We listened on the radios and figured out it was one of the guys in my flight, so we asked him if they noticed anything odd in their flight when we saw them on the crew bus. They had no clue what happened. So after talking about it a lot and having us each draw our ground tracks, we decided it must have just been a combination of poor visibility and the fact that he was at a position on our windscreen that was blocked most of the time by the canopy bow. It happened so fast that our nerves didn't get a chance to rise up at all in the flight. But after my IP and I shut the plane down on the ground, we both sorta took a second to say "woh...".

During my second flight yesterday (a formation), we were doing our formation straight-in approach to land with me flying the #2 position and an IP flying solo in the lead aircraft. During formation approaches as wing, you pretty much have your eyes glued to lead's jet so you can stay together. But the IP in the lead jet gave a signal for us to look out forward and so both my IP and I looked forward. We saw a bird but it was already out of our flight path. A minute later, lead gave the same signal and we both looked again and saw two big hawks swirling around right in our flight path. My IP took the jet and maneuvered off to the left (away from lead) and the birds flew by, one diving, one climbing. And then I got the jet back to get into position and land. Again, it happened so fast, there wasn't any time to meditate on the issue, but it made me think a lot once I was on the ground about what I would have had to do if we had an actual bird strike at that point (mile from the runway, 400' above the ground).

But no time to think about all the millions of "what ifs" when there's my advanced contact checkride only three flights away. There's a HUGE amount of general knowledge questions that are fair game on this checkride, so I've got a lot of studying to do. And before May 16th, I'll have the formation checkride and then we'll be done with tweets!! I can't really see the light at the end yet, but I don't think I'll be able to see that until I'm debriefing a passed form checkride.

Up up and away