10Dec00 Contact Week 8

     Well my week of 85 degrees is over and now its back to freezing my butt off when I go fly. I got back the 2nd and 95% of the squadron had a welcome back and recap briefing on the 3rd. The other 5% flew for some odd reason. I had my mandatory warm-up on Thursday and it went really well. For some reason when I don't fly for a while, I do better. I guess it gives me time for everything to sink in. For the warm up we did everything. All the high work and all the low work. The only thing I had a problem with was I didn't maintain speed on the 45 AoB turn during the turn pattern. You need to add a little power for this part. The spin went well, but I learned later that we almost got into an out of control flight situation because this particular plane didn't want to fully develop the spin. I didn't notice..... He then pulled my power and I tried a HAPL. It was too tight and we kept on trying them until I loosened it up a little. I think the hardest part of the whole HAPL thing is hitting high key. The best thing is to maintain one wingtip distance until you are 1000 feet above high key (2500 AGL) then head on over. If you are low, hold off on the flaps, if you are way low, turn in sooner, but don't let your low key get tight or you won't make the turn into final. Concentrate on getting the first 4 steps done then you can relax a bit more with the rest. In the LAPL you want to do the first 6 items fast. If you have time do the others in order. If not, do the most important like shutting the engine off, blowing the canopy and getting the flaps down. Your mayday call in this situation can just be "3E123 going down!" If that's all the time you have, that's it. After the HAPLs and LAPLs, we did a PPEL to Evergreen and saturated as I was, I forgot to do the landing checklists most of the time. One thing that I noticed is that its easier to do the ELP onto a runway....so you should do is visualize a runway in the middle of a farmers field when you are doing a HAPL or LAPL. That way you can orient yourself better. At high key, you can see more or less where low key should be by looking at whatever is at your wingtip. That's more or less what you should be over when at 1200 AGL. The highlight of this flight was dodging a big bird by about 5 feet on crosswind.
     The next day I flew my end of block flight which was FAM-8. It was basically the exact same thing as the flight before. The only difference is that I got to concentrate more on the  HAPLs and LAPLs more since the only high work we did was a spin and an approach turn stall.

Contact Week 9

     Week 9 I only flew once due to weather and scheduling conflicts. This is the time of the time of the year with the worst weather so my departure from whiting might take a bit longer. I don't even know where I want to go or what I want to fly. I'll get to that later. Anyway, I went in Wednesday, had a great brief, got out to the plane and was on top of everything in the cockpit. I was checking stuff left and right waiting for him to pull some dirty IP trick such as turning my attitude gyro off. Nothing. Took off prepared for an emergency out of homefield. Nothing. I had decided on going to area one for the first time since like November of last year and I soon learned that I was pretty rusty with the area. The departure went perfectly and I got into the area feeling pretty good. My spin and approach turn stalls went flawlessly and I later found out I earned a 5 on each of them. Things started going poorly when I got a chip light and had to do a PEL over to Silverhill. I was still having a problem judging the gliding capability to get to high key so I arrived low and for some reason I refused to add power since that would be proving I wouldn't have made it if the engine failed. With a PEL, as soon as you realize you might be low, you should add max power for that emergency and get back to altitude. He had to correct me on that. I came in a little tight and had to wave myself off. He took me out to the same starting point again and let me do it 3 more times. I landed the rest of them fine and on the last two I didn't have to add power at all. After the last PEL, he wanted to do some bounces since we were already there. Now I had been flying in area 2 for most of my flights and hadn't been to area one in a long time. In area two we do our pattern to the left and the PELs to the right while in area one its the opposite. I had just done a PEL going left and when I went for a regular crosswind, I turned left. The IP corrected me and I put it into my head to remember that pattern in area one was to the right. Anyway, he gave me streaming fuel and so I proceded to do a PEL in the pattern. I remembered to leave my gear down climbed and reduced and when I got to pattern low key (the 180), I put the flaps down. As soon as I hit that lever I realized what I did and banged my head. I had even told myself not to put the flaps down when I had decided to leave the gear down. Its just habit. I even put my flaps down when I'm told by the IP to do a no flap landing. Its a hard habit to lose. After I pulled up and was turning xwind, I had a simulated engine failure, I decided to go for runway 5 instead of going around for 16 which turned out to be the right decision. There was no other choice. Since we were the only plane in the pattern I could actually fly it down to just a couple of feet off the runway. Normally you can't do this so it was nice that I could go all the way through with it. We went around and I got some other emergency I can't remember right now and then headed out. 5 miles out I got a simulated engine fire light. He said it wasn't confirmed so I turned back to Silverhill for  PEL and then he said he started seeing flames so I went into a HAPL. To my surprise it actually worked out perfectly. Coming out I got a simulated flameout and did a LAPL in to another field which worked out really nicely too. I guess I'm getting the hang of it. We then went over to Saufley and he said my basic airwork grade depended on everything I did for the next 5 minutes while he used the relief tube. I got the Saufley called initial and was lining up for R/W 5. If you remember, I had drilled into my head that the pattern is to the right in area one so I set myself up on the left side of the r/w to break right. Well halfway down the runway I notice another 34 pretty close coming the other way on my left side. At that point I realized that Saufley is the exception to the rule and you are supposed to break away from the "tower" side (there is no tower, supposed to pretend). I called for the break anyway and got the response "494 you're on the wrong side of the runway, cleared for the break." I thought I was an idiot for that too until I told people the story and they told me about when it happened to them. Anyway, the rest of the pattern stuff went well after that and he told me to take him home. As we were leaving, once we were cleared of the class C airspace, I got a simulated power loss at 800 feel AGL. That caught me totally by surprise and trying to make a field I got to 140 knots. I was at 170 and had to get to 100 knots so I climbed which made me too high for the field I had to reach and in the whole meddle of things I didn't check my airspeed again. I would have made it but it wasn't pretty at all. He told me again to take him home and then gave me a chip light so I went to do a PEL and he then told me he heard grinding and felt vibration and he had to repeat it a couple of times before it clicked to shut down the engine. I then did a HAPL into Summerdale which worked beautifully. Climbing out of that trying to get home again, he gave me uncontrollable high power. So I did a PEL to Barin, climbed up WAY high and shut down my engine as per the procedures. Since I climbed up high, I gave myself plenty of time to plan my approach, I dropped my gear, went through the checklists and started doing bowties and s turns to make it to high key. Another beautiful pattern to the runway. The emergency landing pattern has been the hardest thing for me during training so I was really happy that it was finally working out. Again he told me to head home and this time it was for real. Coming home on the new course rules (they changed some stuff so watch out with old gouge), it was my turn to use the relief tube. I didn't know what a mission it was. It took me like 5 minutes just to get into position. You have to reach down and grab the funnel tube thing which is a mission because it gets unhooked and wanders to the rear of the seat. With all the gear and parachute and harness and all it makes it a real mission. Then you have to unhook one side of your harness which is impossible to just unhook one part because they all release at the same time. That was fun. After I got the other 3 straps hooked up again I tried shifting my SV-2 vest out of the way which kept on wanting to come back to center. Look, just go to the bathroom before you fly and don't drink too much water before either. At least I got to spray the town of Molino. Right over it. The rest of the flight went ok and I thought I had hooked the flight for all the stupid things I did, but I actually got descent grades so I was happy. Thursday I was cancelled for weather and Friday I sniveled out to go see a friend's OCS graduation at NASP. I wouldn't have flown anyway due to weather.