T-38 Solo!

Today, I had my first solo in T-38! We had a couple guys in our flight scheduled to solo in the morning but the weather wasn't cooperating, so nobody solo'd in the first line of jets. I flew dual and we were in and out of clouds the whole time. Then it started to clear up in the afternoon and the weather status changed to allow solos in the pattern only (as opposed to unrestricted where solos can go out to the practice areas and do acro). So with the probability of bad weather tomorrow, our flight launched 4 initial solos and the other flight in our class launched a few of theres. So the 6 or 7 of us all stepped out and did laps in the traffic pattern practicing our landings. It was a solid ride, nothing scary, nothing broke, no emergencies. It was cool too since the clouds were only 500 feet above us or so and there were small showers all over the place. You could see the rain showers, all only a mile or so around, so we all were basically flying in between the cylinders of rain and picking up so rain here and there along the way. I even got to fly through a rainbow. It didn't really look like much as I went through it, but the thought of it was pretty neat.

In the T-38 phase, there's a lot more solo rides. Unfortunately, there's less rides overall before the first checkride. So I've only got about 4 solos and 4 dual rides to get ready to take my contact checkride. Every flight is short since the jet burns fuel so much (flights over 1:15 or so are pretty rare). And when weather is bad, we get even more restrictions, so there's no time to take a lap in the practice area and think about what you're doing or talk about the maneuver you just screwed up. You step out with a compact plan, execute it as best you can with lots of flexing here and there to make it all work out (ATC, weather, and everything else always changes things), and then you rush back home and debrief the whole thing for an hour.

Unlike the solos in T-37, we'll eventually get the chance to do solo instrument flights in the T-38 (fly through the clouds and shoot instrument approaches down to other airports). I've down that in civilian flying, but it's a lot different when you're going 5 miles a minute. Everyone in our flight has been pretty stressed out in this first contact/visual flying stage with a handful of busted flights (Unsatisfactory). "Emergencies" also seem a lot more prevalent these days. I guess it's just because we're all flying so much and so the odds just work out that way, but you can never let your guard down. Pretty much all of the emergencies have been calm low-threat situations where something just isn't quite working the way it's supposed to. But every day has its potential. And we always train for the emergency to hit in the worst weather, when you're probably solo, and have no fuel left to play around with. I've been lucky so far with getting good jets and having relatively decent performance out of myself, but I'm still just trying to keep up in the jet. Next step, in a couple weeks, checkride.

On a side note, our last assignment night here at Sheppard brought TWO F-22 drops. There's still a lot of U-28s and NSAs (which suck). And although having F-22s dropped to fresh 2nd LTs is cool, our class has a feeling that there won't be any for us since they only drop them in spurts of 3 classes or so and that puts us just past the timeline. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the F-15C drops come back since their training units have been getting back in gear lately.

And it's HOT! I have no idea how high the temperature gets when the canopy is closed and I've got my flight suit, G suit, parachute, and helmet on, but I sweat buckets every day. Texas sucks!