Berck is down at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls this week. He and three other guys from work flew two of their planes down there. Today, after going through a medical exam, ejection seat training, and getting fitted for a parachute, he got to fly one of these. They did loops and rolls and flew in formation and even inverted. He’ll fly his much slower plane back tomorrow.
On August 3, if I haven’t found another one, I’ll be out of a job. As you might imagine, I’m suffering from a fair amount of anxiety as a result. I had seriously hoped that I’d have a job offer from a certain organization south of here by now. But I don’t. I still hope that I will, but in case I don’t, I need a backup plan. And I don’t really have one. There are certainly several options available to me. One would be to continue working for my present employer in Arizona. It wouldn’t be a bad job,…
It’s cold out. Looks like it got down to about -10F last night. The red car barely wanted to crank over this morning when I took Joanna work, the clutch felt frozen, the shocks didn’t work. It was cold. We’ve only got one car with snow tires, which generally works out okay, since I don’t fly when there’s snow on the ground. So I take Joanna to work, then go home. Usually when the weather is bad we sit around all night, hoping for a phone call. If we haven’t gotten one by the time the alarm goes off, you…
I’m exhausted. Part of it is because I got up at 5am, a feat to which I’ve recently become unaccustomed. Most of it is that, for some reason, flight instruction is physical exhausting. It’s not like you do much physical. Sit around, talk, stand around, talk, sit in a plane and move levers while talking, and sit around and talk. Part of it’s the heat– it may have only gotten up 85 today, but that was hot. Density altitude was over 9,500ft before 10am, which is never a good day. By the time I finished my last flight, we were…
I currently have four decent students and one “project” as my coworkers and I tend to refer to them. I’m honestly hoping that the project decides that flying isn’t for him, because I don’t think it is. Admittedly, he’s only had 4 flights so far. But still, by this point, I can get a pretty good idea of just how someone is coming along. And he’s just not. Okay, sure, there’s progress, but at this point I think it’d take 50 hours before I felt comfortable soloing him. I suppose it’s entirely possible he’ll end up surprising me, but I…