Trying to stay on top of things

Picture of me after my initial pattern solo.

Initial solo takeoff on Vance Runway 17R

Taxiing out by myself for the first time!

Trying to stay focused after the dual portion of my initial solo

Strapping into the jet for the dual portion of my initial solo.

Sorry it's been a couple weeks since my last update! The past couple weeks have been pretty busy but also very productive.

Two weeks ago, I recovered from my weird stomach virus and started flying again, preparing for my first checkride in the T-6. The "Midphase Check" is designed to test our abilities to safely fly the aircraft in the pattern and prform certain maneuvers in the practice areas. It has a deceiving name because it's not really in the middle of the T-6 program...it's only the first of four checkrides we have to go through. Most of the flights leading up to the check kept me fairly confident in my abilities to pass the checkride, although my poor performance during my initial solo flight was still lingering in the back of my mind. For whatever reason, my initial solo had me rattled; it was just one of those days where my hands weren't talking to my brain, and vice versa. Again, it was a plenty safe flight, but not quite as nice as what I'm used to. That's what makes pilot training...pilot training. There are so many variables that can affect your performance...one little gust of wind can turn a great landing into a near catastrophe if you let it. However, like I said, most of my flights a couple weeks ago were rather assuring.

During the week, I watched other members of my flight go through the checkride - we had several who failed due to problems with their pubs. Pubs are written documents that govern how we fly...kind of the "rules of the road." Often there are updates that need to be written into the documents. If they are not updated, there's no written proof that shows you are abiding with the new publicaitons. It's a technicality that cannot be overlooked when preparing for a checkride.

To prevent this from happening to me, I sat down with some friends that had the updated pubs, and went page by page through all my documents and ensured they were up to speed. It's a tedious process, but necessary to make sure I didn't fail for something so simple as a pubs problem.

Monday afternoon at about 3pm was my scheduled takeoff time for my checkride. All flights in the morning were cancelled for weather, and we weren't exactly sure if we were gonna get clear skies in time. My check IP and I briefed like normal, but he sent me back to my flight room to wait for further word as to whether we were going to launch. The time when we were supposed to walk out to the jet (step time) came and passed, but T-6s were still in a no-go status. For about 10 minutes I thought I was given an extra day to study, but we soon found out there was a clearing line in the clouds forming. T-6s were given a "go" status and the schedulers gave us new takeoff times for all our checkrides (I was one of 5 checkrides in our flight that day). So I went from thinking I had another 24 hours to prepare for my first checkride to having to gathering all my in-flight pubs together and stepping to a new jet in about 10 minutes. Lesson learned: you always have to be prepared to go no matter what external factors exist. All you can control in pilot training is yourself, so make sure you're ready for whatever may come your way....

We took-off and had a pretty normal flight until I finished all my maneuvers in the area. My last maneuver was slow flight where we have our landing gear and flaps extended. I finished the maneuver, brought up the landing gear, but forgot to make a VERY important cockpit call-out that verifies the gear actually was raised. This type of mistake was the same mistake people would hook flights for in earlier missions. This type of mistake was what I knew I could hook for, and would probably be one of the only reasons I could reasonably hook a checkride for. The IP asked me for the gear confirmation, to which I quickly replied "Gear up, flaps up, lights out by 150 knots." It was a costly mistake that I was sure would hook me. I couldn't believe it. All this work and preparation, and I was probably going to hook the ride for a simple sentence I forgot to say. Checkride IPs are not allowed to say what mistakes you made until after the evaluation is complete, so I knew I wouldn't hear whether or not that made any difference in my grade until after I was on the ground. I did my best to put the mistake behind me, but it was a tall order.

The rest of the flight was relatively uneventful....I returned to Vance and landed, got a drink of water, then waited outside my IPs office for the ground evaluation. While sitting there on the couches, I couldn't help but think about that mistake I made. I knew I would fail, have to go onto a progress check (what we call an "88" ride)....not even sure if I could pass that! If I wash out of pilot training, there's very little incentive for the Air Force to keep me especially with the budget cuts we've been going through. All this was floating through my mind as I sat there on the couch for what seemed like an eternity. My IP finally called me into his office, I said a quick prayer, and then I went into the ground eval. In the ground eval, the IP asks general knowledge questions and gives you an Emergency situation which you have to talk your way through. Both parts of the eval went fairly well....I HAD to make up for my mistakes earlier.

Long story short, he NEVER MENTIONED the gear confirmation problem. He talked about the flight, made several comments about some areas I can clean up, but never mentioned what I thought I knew was going to hook me. When he said "Excellent overall!" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I was saved! I passed, and scored one of the two excellents in the flight. Wow....

It was a lesson in how much God really does have in His control...and how little I have in my control. If you ever find yourself in the middle of a checkride thinking you hooked it...keep flying and pushing forward! You never know the final grade until the end.

Tuesday I celebrated my checkride by flying in the morning with an IP who never flew with a student before! Itw as a blast...I think we both enjoyed it. He showed me some new aerobatics like the cuban-8, immelman, lazy 8, and a few others. In the afternoon, I had my first area solo where they let me take an airplane by myself out to an area to practice the aerobatics alone! It was an absolute blast! I did the same thing again Wednesday morning, but never flew again the rest of the week because of weather constraints. Friday was a welcome end to a long and stressful week.

I wish I could blog a little more, but I'm afraid I need to get back into the books before tomorrrow! We're learning all there is to know about instruments and navigation flying...we'll be picking up instrument flying after our "Final Contact" checkride which will likely be the end of this week. Thanks for the prayers....God Bless!

Chris
Psalm 1

Solo, Stomach Virus week

This week is one I'm trying to put behind me and move on from! Weather forced my solo from Monday morning to Monday afternoon. After briefing with my IP, we suited up and stepped to the jet early. Everything felt pretty normal up until takeoff. After I got off the ground, my hands and my head just didn't feel like talking to each other. Nothing I did was unsafe, but sometimes I came close to doing some pretty stupid things. All of my landings with the exception of my last one were definitely "firm" which is pretty unusual for me. The whole time I was pretty frustrated with myself wondering why I couldn't fly this jet like I usually do. All my IPs, including this one in the past, have all marveled at my basic aircraft control. But Monday brought along the ugliest flying I've had to date. Nevertheless, after the dual-portion of the solo, my IP told me to sit tight while he unbuckled and sent me on my way solo! I have pics I'll try uploading a friend of mine took of me while I was on the ground. It was quite an experience to take a 4 million dollar airplane up in the air by yourself...gotta say I was a little bit nervous! But despite the jitters, one of my friends later told me he saw me land while he waited to take off and said I "greased it in"...(ie, smooth landing). If I did, I don't remember it, haha!

After landing, post-flighting, and getting thrown in the solo tank (which feels good after sweating for over an hour), I started feeling queezy and cramped up. Our flight soon got released and I went home and went straight to bed after trying to down some chicken noodle soup. About an hour later, I learned how painful it is to throw up chicken noodle soup! If you've never done it, I wouldn't recommend it, haha! I spent the rest of the night traveling to and from my bed and my toilet, "crapping puke and puking crap." The next day I went to sick call and saw a doctor who found it amusing I was "leaking at both ends." Gotta always find the humor in everything.... He gave me an IV for about an hour because my heart rate was slightly elevated from being dehydrated. The rest of Tuesday was much of the same...traveling to and from the bathroom and bed. Wednesday came and I felt slightly better, and by Thursday I was good enough to return to work. I got off of DNIF (Duty Not Including Flying) and was cleared to fly a couple sims. I'm quite a bit behind in the realm of Academics, but my flight commander and I worked out a schedule to get me caught up by the end of this week.

Even though it was a bit of a downer week, God has been really good to me and I've been able to use a little bit of the down time to spend more time with Him. At this point in pilot training, I really don't know what track I should go down (if I were to have a choice in the first place), but I'm confident in the fact God has His hand on my life and will steer me where I need to go. I don't know if it was the illness or something else, but I've been steadily realizing recently that there's more to life than flying in the Air Force (no kidding sherlock!). Don't get me wrong, I LOVE flying, LOVE my job, I love the flight I'm in, and love the fact I get to live out my childhood dreams. But even in doing so, God has been showing me that there's more to life outside of a career. And that is a big reason why I'm not sure what track I should go down right now. Granted, I have PLENTY of time to think about it because we won't actually track select until the end of July. But my decisions now will have an impact on the rest of my life and on my future family's lives as well (God-willing). Plenty of things to think about, but I can rest in the truth that God is in control and knows exactly what I need to do to fulfill His will, not mine.

God Bless!
Chris
Proverbs 16:9

Week 9-10

The past couple weeks have been a little crazy. I flew both on Monday and Tuesday of last week, Tuesday being my "pattern-only sortie". The pattern only sortie gave me a chance to fine turne my pattern procedures which I will need to have down cold before I take the airplane by myself during my "solo." Both flights went pretty well, and I felt like I have a pretty good handle on the landing characteristics of the T-6 after my pattern only. Unfortunately, little did I know that I wouldn't see the inside of the cockpit again until 8 days later. Wednesday and Thursday I wasn't scheduled for flying at all. I completed my last emergency procedures simulator ride on Wednesday morning, but wasn't scheduled for any events on Thursday. Friday, I was scheduled to fly in the early afternoon, but a T-6 pilot ejected and precluded anyone from flying. For more, you can go to www.vance.af.mil for more information.

Due to a combination of scheduling and weather, I didn't get back into the aircraft again until this past Thursday and Friday. Both flights went very well, especially considering how long it had been since I had last flown. But I can't slow down the level of studying I need to do. I have my solo flight on Monday morning, then my first checkride only about 4 rides afterwards. On top of this, we as a class have started instrument academics and simulators, so I could be double-turning from a flight to a class or a flight to a sim to another flight in one day. Monday morning, we have our first instruments test before I fly solo. This will probably be the busiest time in phase II since we have to balance academics, simulators, and flying all at once. It'll take some thinking ahead, but we should be able to manage.

I wish I could update more. We've been restricted on what we can say about last Friday's incident, and I've been pretty busy and stressed with all the events of pilot training in recent weeks. Every day has something new for us, so it's never a dull moment. I still absolutely love the flying, but it can be a little stressful to try to stay on top of everything we are responsible for. The good news is we are now officially finished with the 15 day program! One milestone down, plenty more to go! It's tough to convey what the day to day experience really is like on this blog. Maybe I'll spend a little more time next weekend explaining what the day to day ops typically look like now.

Next week will be spent taking my first instruments test on Monday followed by my solo flight later in the morning, then preparing for my first checkride known as "Mid-Phase" checkride. Very important and busy week; hopefully the weather will hold out!

Chris

Week 9

Monday and Tuesday were both great weather days for flying. Clear skies, plenty of horizon, and not too many bad gusts of wind. The profiles I flew were both pretty similar to what I've been doing. Go out to the practice area, practice full stalls, traffic pattern stalls, emergency landing pattern stalls (ELP stalls), slow flight, and recoveries from unusual attitudes. Then we would go to another airport (either dogface or a civilian airport just next to Vance called Woodring) and practice different types of landings and visual approaches. I think it was Tuesday I got to see my first spin in the T-6. A spin is where you stall the airplane so it can't fly, but you induce a yawing motion so the aircraft will continue to flat-spin until you recover (remember Top Gun....spinning out to sea??) Anyways, the IP demoed the first one, then let me try the second. It's like you're in control of your own rollercoaster ride...and you don't even have to stand in line :-).

Wednesday was a little more exciting than what I had anticipated. I briefed the flight with my IP in the morning just as we had done in the earlier two flights, even though the weather wasn't that great. We suited up in our harnesses and Gsuits at life support, then humped it out to the jet for our pre-flight inspection. This time, the IP let me strap in while he did the exterior walk-around...again, because we wanted to beat the impending thunderstorm that was on its way. After getting everything hooked up in the cockpit, we closed the canopy and started it up, just like every other flight. While taxiing, we went through our last "brief" which we call R-NEWS (RAIM, NAVAIDS, EMERGENCIES, WEATHER, SID). The most important of those is the weather and emergencies checks. We look at the weather and determine what we would do in case of an in-flight emergency near the airport. We go into more detail with this brief an hour prior to the flight in the squadron, but we also discuss a little while in the aircraft. On this particular day, in case of an engine failure the clouds would have prevented us from climbing to our "high key" or the top part of our emergency landing pattern we fly when we don't have an engine. This usually isn't a problem, since there are other ways to intercept an ELP, so we kept going wtih the flight.

After takeoff, I brought up the gear and started a turn to crosswind to keep us in the pattern at Vance. When we got on downwind, my IP asked me if I heard a noise. I kept very quiet on the radio for about 5 seconds, when I could start to hear a metallic "ringing" noise, albeit very muffled. I told my IP I also heard it, when he asked me where it was. As I leaned forward to try to tell, it got louder, meaning it was in front of my position. I told him it was in front of me, and not a second later, he took control of the aircraft and pulled us into an abrupt turning climb to intercept the ELP below high key just as I briefed on the taxiway. We declared an emergency and got traffic priority for an immediate landing on Runway 35R, the closest piece of concrete to us. We climbed well over 1,000 feet above the normal traffic pattern altitude just in case we lost our engine in the process of trying to land. This type of procedure is something they harp on us and beat into our heads, and now I finally see why. From the moment we declared an emergency to the time we shut down the engine and had firefighters on our wing was probably less than two minutes. It only took about 90 seconds to climb, intercept our ELP, drop the gear and line up on runway centerline to put it down, then use our remaining energy to taxi clear of the runway. We shut the engine down as soon as we were clear of 35R and started going through normal post-flight procedures. My IP stressed to me how important it is to do all the normal checks even slower than normal during an emergency, because it's easy to overlook something easy and simple when you're all hyped up on adrenaline. As it turns out, our "emergency" might not have been anything more than a loose screw on my rudder pedals making a high pitch noise that sounded like an engine problem. But it's better to play it safe than lose the one and only engine you have on the aircraft.

So, I'm officially the first in our class to have an in-flight emergency in the T-6...lucky me ;-). Thank God it didn't turn out to be anything serious, but if it had been an actual engine problem, we were always in a great position to put the aircraft down with plenty of runway to spare. That's what training now will do to prepare us for the day when we have a real problem and we're the only ones in the plane to solve it. Hopefully that won't happen again any time soon :-).

Thanks for the prayers...got a big week ahead. I might be able to solo on Friday if I fly every day this week. If not, I will be soloing early next week. Take care!

Chris
Joshua 1:8-9

Week 8

Going into Monday I was a bit concerned about my airsickness that I experienced last week. I knew if I didn't get over it quickly, I'd have to go on medication and maybe some other "training" (ie, spin you in a chair until you get sick on the ground.....not fun!). In the morning I had a simulator designed to let me practice flying a normal sortie on the ground. It went really well, and in the end the instructor let me practice my landings in the pattern (which we sometimes refer to it as a closed pattern if we stay close to the runway and make multiple landings very quickly). Another choice we have in the pattern is to fly around a large rectangle that takes about 2 or 3 minutes to circumnavigate before we can make our approach to landing.

I was a little uneasy about being scheduled in the afternoon to fly (usually a little more turbulent in the afternoon), but it turned out just fine. The weather was decent and I got to practice all my maneuvers, including all my stalls, slow flight, unusual attitude recoveries, and a G-X exercise (where we practice pulling G's). The G-X is where I got sick on Friday, but Monday went really well. I think it helped that I was flying more so than my IP. I felt a little queezy while flying in the traffic pattern at Vance and at our Auxillary Field called "Dogface", but that's pretty typical for someone's third flight. In the morning, my sim IP reminded me to try to have fun while flying....I remembered him saying that when i was flying in the afternoon in the traffic pattern. To make some of our turns, we are only 500 feet above the ground at 200knots and are pulling up to 3 Gs sometimes. When I was flying part of the pattern, I looked down and saw the road that leads the front security gate of the base. Going 200 knots at about a 90 degree angle (a little steeper than I should have been)...I realized how awesome this was!! I started to really enjoy the flying, and would intentionally try to yank the plane into the turns as fast as I could, just for the fun of it. Not sure my IP enjoyed the ride in the back, so....sorry....

Tuesday we were cancelled for weather, but we flew again on Wednesday. I got a chance to perfect my maneuvers I flew on Monday, and this time I got all of them at or above the required standard. Again, we had a blast, but the weather was a little tough to navigate through. There was a point where I had to fly into a cloud during the recovery back to Vance, and had to rely on my instruments to get me back home. I felt a little disoriented at one point, because I was entering a left turn and didn't realize it. I looked up, it was all white outside, looked down, and saw I was in a 30 degree bank to my left on my attitude indicator. I quickly recovered, but it was a good lesson learned on focusing on the important gauges when flying in a cloud.

Wednesday night I read John 8:48-59. In this passage, Jesus says he is not seeking his own glory, but glory for his father. Man, if Jesus didn't seek glory for himself, how much more should I not seek it for myself! It was a good and much needed reminder for me to not seek my own glory in pilot training, but to somehow glorify God through what I do and say. It's tough when it seems like the Air Force is all about boasting about how well you fly or how bad you fly. Hopefully this blog will continue to show not how well I am doing or just how bad I'm doing, but how much God is blessing me this year. There will be some great flights, but it's not because of my own power that I flew well. It's only because God has given me the grace to overcome some of the obstacles. There will also be some bad flights that I fail or "hook"...that doesn't mean God has forsaken me. It only means he's trying to teach me something I need to learn, and haven't learned yet. Going into training brought me a lot of anxiety about trying to endure some of the hardships it brings about. But Romans 8:35-39 reminds us that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. When I am in Him, there's nothing left for me to fear, even in pilot training. I'm not there yet, but God hasn't given up on me yet :-).

Thursday I was at least 2 or 3 flights ahead of everyone else because I kept getting scheduled when the weather was good to fly. They took me off the schedule for that day and gave me an Emergency Procedures simulator where we practice what to do if our engine fails, get a fire indication in flight, uncommanded power changes, etc. The sim went well overall; I was a lot calmer about entering the emergency than the last EP sim I had. Scott, I took your advice about "winding the clock"....that helped a lot...thanks buddy!!

Friday I flew a similar profile to what I had earlier in the week, and just had a blast. The weather was almost perfect, with the exception of high altitude clouds. I still have a ton to learn and be able to do, but I'm very happy with where we are at. I have a great flight of IPs, and awesome students in the flight with me. Hopefully we'll all be able to get through this together. Thanks for the prayers everyone...we'll see ya next week!

Chris
Romans 8:35-39

Week 7

Monday and Tuesday was spent finishing our weather classes and reviewed all the lessons we learned up to this week. Monday afternoon I had my last simulator ride before I hit the flightline on Thursday. It's purpose was to go over all the traffic pattern procedures and radio calls I would encounter on my dollar ride (first T-6 flight). The sim itself was in an OFT, the highest quality sim we have. It's a lot like flying in a planetarium theater, just on a smaller scale with a T-6 cockpit in the middle of it. The comical part of this sim was during the debrief when the IP said I should get a nose job so my oxygen mask would fit better! He was a very honest IP! He also proceeded to say I say "Yes Sir" and "Uh, huh" too often and it's annoying! Although this seems rather rude, I'm glad he was trying to help me. He gave me high marks for the sim, saying it was the best sortie of that kind he's seen from a student this far along in training. I think he was just making up for the previous two comments he made, haha.

The exciting part of the week came after we took our weather test on Wednesday. We ended the test, enjoyed a quick lunch, then went straight to the flightline for orientation. 14 of us went to the 8th Flying Training Squadron's C flight (myself included), and 15 of us went to D flight. In C flight, we learned about the squadron's policies for flying as well as some administrivia and how to build a formal brief. A formal brief is a presentation we have to give every morning. It includes local weather observations, forcasts, status of operations, and how the weather affects how we will fly the sorties. Sounds simple, but we only have 10 minutes every morning to build it, set up the room, and know what to say in front of all the IPs. All 14 of us have specific jobs related to building the brief and setting up the room. My job is to print off ops notes for the flight commander to brief to us, convert the zulu (UTC) times in the weather forcasts and observations to local time, and to build a slide that shows which direction to crab the aircraft to compensate for the winds at different altitudes at different points in the pattern. After doing this a couple times, I feel we've gotten the hang of it. Thursday's formal brief in the morning was a little rough, but they let us try again in the afternoon.

Thursday morning after the formal brief, we met with our instructors for dollar rides. I met with my IP and we talked for about an hour and a half, suited up in our G-suits and Parachute harnesses, then rode a bus to the jet. We did a quick walk-around the plane, then hopped up on the wing and strapped in. I went through all the preflight and start-up procedures just like I had done in the sims many times before. Everything worked well, although I was slower getting the thing started than I ultimately need to be. The IP flew the take-off because the field was under IFR conditions. We lined up on the runway, turned off the nosewheel steering, and pushed up the power. As soon as the engine spooled up, I was actually pushed back in the seat and we were off. Once we climbed past about 5,000 feet, we broke through the cloud layer and it was a bright sun that greeted us. Unfortunately, our auxilary field known as "Dogface" was closed due to the weather, so we were stuck doing basic aircraft control in the practice area above the clouds. He let me take the aircraft and do some steep turns. After about 30 minutes, I wasn't feeling so hot, so we came back to Vance on an instrument approach and landed after 1.1 hours. Thursday afternoon, we had a stand-up and shotgun questions. Stand-up is when the whole flight, students and IPs alike, sit in the flight room and listen to the flight commander describe an in-flight emergency situation. After the description of the situation, the flight commander will randomly select one of us to analyze the situation and handle the emergency as if we were flying. It's designed to put pressure on us to simulate the stress we will likely feel in the aircraft. "Shotgun" is another high pressure situation when every student is stood up and asked random general knowledge questions. Again, it's designed to make us think on our feet under pressure situations. If we can't answer general questions when we're at 1G and 0 knots, there's not a chance we can handle an emergency 2 miles above the ground at 200 knots while pulling 4 G's inverted. Flying is an inherently dangerous business, which is why they try to make pilot training such a stressful environment.

Friday, my airsickness got a lot worse. I was still just passively sick, meaning I didn't fill up any vomit bags. However, we almost had to cut the flight's profile short towards the end. The IP had control of the airplane and pulled about 4Gs. I've pulled 4 Gs in an airplane before and had no problems, even without a Gsuit. But for whatever reason, my airsickness really got to me and I almost Glocked. My vision went away and my whole body felt tingly. I still knew what was going on and could hear my IP talking, but I was probably only a few seconds from passing out. I couldn't tense any muscles in my lower body to help keep the blood in my head because I was too sick. Part of it is probably dehydration, part of it may be diet. Whatever the case, hopefully Monday will be a little better.

Week 6

This last week was the last FULL week of Academics until we finally start flying. Monday began the 3 day string of simulator rides to demonstrate procedural competance. We flew departures, arrivals, recoveries, and a few straight-in landings to show the IP we could run in-flight checks, make radio calls, while still keeping up wtih the Aircraft. It really is a juggling act, and is very apparent how important it is to memorize certain things. The more you have memorized, the less you have to try to read while in the airplane and the more you can keep your eyes outside the aircraft. Monday afternoon was our Flying Fundamentals Exam. I wasn't sure how I would do going into the test, and about 30 minutes into it, I wasn't sure how I'd come out! I kept couting the questions I thought I might have missed, and I kept coming up with the max number of questions we were allowed to miss! To my great relief, I only missed two somehow, and I lived to fight another day.....

Tuesday and Wednesday was spent doing our Emergency Procedures simulator. I crawled in a UTD sim on Tuesday, and tried starting the aircraft, taxiing out to the imaginary runway I couldn't see (UTDs don't have video screens in front of the cockpit...only the guages work), taking off of 17L, departing to the area, and working in the area. During each of these phases, the IP would trip an emergency and expect me to apply the boldface to the problem. Overall I did pretty well and got an Excellent. However, we did the same exact type of profile on Wednesday in an IFT simulator (one WITH a video screen) and found myself fumbling around the cockpit all day long. I was moving entirely too fast because I thought I knew the procedures really well. The problem was, I DID know the procedures. I would flip switches too fast and wouldn't spend enough time ANALYZING the problem and trying to think through the steps. I was pretty iritated at myself for making dumb mistakes on Wednesday and couldn't wait until the next time we could get in a simulator and try to make up for it. BIG lesson learned: in an emergency, take a second to think about what the airplane is telling you BEFORE you apply the boldface procedures. For instance, during an engine failure on takeoff, you're supposed to wait to kill the engine until after you stop completely on the runway. I would get too far ahead of myself and shut down the engine while I was still rolling on the runway. Gotta Slow Down....

Thursday we spent the whole day in the classroom learning about weather. Our weather exam here is notorious for being the worst of them all...we don't test until this coming Wednesday, so there'll be plenty of time to study for it.

Friday we spent time continuing weather lessons, then took our Contact Exam. I got a 100% on this one thank God. The afternoon was spent on the flight line getting oriented to our new duties on top of flying. I don't have time to go into the details, but needless to say, it feels a bit overwhelming. Wish I could go into more detail with this blog right now...maybe I will be able to update it next weekend when I have more time. I have my dollar ride (first flight) this Thursday, so I'll do my best to give you some nice detail on how it goes. Plenty of studying to do...

-Chris
Psalm 18:2