Wet Footprints

For a little while now, I've known it was time to go.  I've spent almost seven years of my career at Laughlin Air Force Base flying with the 85th.  Eight if you include the 6 months at Pilot Instructor Training in San Antonio as part of the deal. Once I realized that my time was coming to an end, I started noticing details about the place that I hadn't before--things that make this place, and the experience of being a primary pilot training instructor, somehow worth it in the end.

When a student in Air Force UPT goes on his first solo flight, it is a pretty big deal.  The vast majority of kids that wash out do so prior to achieving this goal.  Quite a few still falter before finishing the program, but the first time you solo a $5M aircraft, you feel like the king of the world.  For decades, when a student lands after his first solo his classmates carry him to tank of water that each class decorates.  It is normally filled putrid water that's been out in the sun for the duration of the class being pre-solo.  They toss him fully clothed into the pool as part of the baptism of becoming an Air Force pilot.  As part of the tradition, there is an unwritten rule that if you are able to make it from the jet back to your flight room without being dunked--the flight owes you a case of your choice of beverage.

As you would expect, no one escapes their dunk.  Even the very rare individual (we had one recently change from his flight suit into a FedEx uniform, grab a handcart, and try to "deliver" boxes to his flight room--he was caught) that makes it back to the flight room is summarily tackled and carried back to the dunk tank.

One of the little details I've noticed recently surrounds this tradition.  Our hallways are carpeted here.  When a kid comes back into the building to change his soaked clothes, he leaves a long trail of wet footprints down the hall.  To me, it resembles a trail left by a ghost.  Every student that has come through this building in pursuit of the coveted wings has left this trail behind them.  To see the trail warms my heart that once again, my instructors have taken a kid who knew nothing about flying and taught him how to master the skies. 

To leave that trail means that you have just had one of the most significant events in your life--so recent that the water has yet to evaporate from the steps you have taken.

Excellence

Whenever anyone would say that my training at requal for Undergraduate Pilot Training would be easy my answer was always the same--"well, it's not exactly like riding a bike."

Apparently, in a lot of respects, it is.

I'm doing well. Very well. I've been through eight official aircraft training formal schools and I've managed to keep my head above water in all of them. The hardest of them all was, surprisingly, the Cessna 172 training that I went through in Hondo, TX in 1993. But I survived them all. Key word in that sentence is "survive." For the first time in my career, I'm excelling at a flying program.

The T-6 Texan II is an absolutely amazing aircraft. Usually when that description accompanies a weapon system it implies a great deal of complexity. This plane is no exception. I am essentially going from a go-cart to a sports car. But there have been two concepts that have been pulling me through that apparently are working in my favor.

First--the single-seat mentality. In T-37's 90% of your flying was a notch higher on the difficulty scale than flying by yourself. You were actually flying with another person that literally had no idea what exactly he was doing--so your awareness had to be even higher than if you were alone. That ability, that I thought would have been lost after four years of sitting on the ground, has served me extremely well in the last month or so. The mentality that I am truly alone, rather than being safeguarded by an instructor in either the front or rear seat of the plane, has allowed me to make decisions and fly the plane better than I could have ever hoped to fly my last one. It seems to be paying off.

Second--the "training" mentality. I have been going through this course not only with the perspective of surviving to the next flight (which is definitely a concern) but looking at it through the eyes of a basic UPT student. How would what I am doing come across to a student learning to fly? That thought has allowed me to not only look at it from the 1st-person perspective, but also to expand the possibilities of what we are actually doing here. It has made me very comfortable with operating the plane.

So, as an update, things are going well. I have never "slam dunked" a course in my life, but thus far I seem to be doing just that. I just hope that it can carry me through to the end.