Our Dumb Blog

And today I learned how to open hangar doors.

I was actually scheduled to fly at “blue flight, second go.” Because giving me an actual time would have been too simple. I sat in on the blue flight commander’s standup. This was the second standup I’d been to, and the blue flight commander seems to be more easy going than the white flight commander, but his students seemed to perform better. I’m not sure how well I would have done in his students’ shoes today. They certainly gave better answers than I would have expected from any student around 10-15 hours of flight time and possibly better than many private pilots.

When I got to the air field, the posted status was “STANDBY” which means that no one is flying, but that they haven’t given up for the day. The situation was no better after standup. Storms were building in the southwest and headed northeast right over the field. After a couple of hours things cleared up a bit, and many of the students were released to fly.

The Chief Flight Instructor, Leo, sent the white flight commander out on a “functional check flight” (because “test flight” is too short) and sent me with him, with the intention of completing my first new hire flight lesson. The plane was rigged with a digital fuel pressure gauge as well as a hand-held digital tack for the test flight. Maintenance just completed a factory modification to the fuel system to help prevent vapor lock and needed fuel pressure readings at various altitudes. My new hire lesson involved flying a North Departure, a tour of the north areas and the Greenland Corridor as well as a North Arrival. Since the test flight required precise readings at precise engine RPM and altitudes, Samuelson performed the takeoff and climb-out while I alternated between trying to make sense of the Air Force chart of the practice areas and helping take readings. Right after we climbed through 10,000 feet and got the required reading, we were recalled back to the field for thunderstorm activity. Anxious to get the test flight out of the way, Samuelson decided to let every one else head back ahead of us while we finished the last reading, to be taken at 12,000 feet. I doubt we were maintaining 300 feet/minute, and it took awhile to get up there. After getting the reading, he pulled the throttle to idle and set us up on a pretty steep descent so we could get down to 8,500 before we hit the North Corridor for the arrival. Right as we were about to report leaving area india to head back, they told us that they’d gotten lightning within 10 NM of the field and that it was closed, so we should hang out in the north areas for awhile. We thought that would work out just fine and let us finish the lesson. I took the controls and turned back east so he could show me the borders of the northeastern practice areas. We got to point Douglas, which I tried to commit to memory, when they told us to return to the field as quickly as possible. Samuelson conferred with Skywalker (the call sign for the AFS (Academy Flight Screening) monitor in the Academy tower), and they decided that we could head straight for the airfield and not fly the actual corridors. Since the field was behind some hills, I couldn’t really see it, but headed for the Academy on the hill. Samuelson punched up KAFF on the GPS (which, in spite of being a big beautiful moving map screen in front of me, never occurred to me as being an option), and I flew the course it suggested. While I was watching him program the GPS (not what I should have been doing) I managed to lose about 300 feet of altitude which took a little while to get back.

Mostly happened because I have no instrument scanning ability when sitting in the left seat for instruments on the right. I got used to instruments in front of me, and then instruments on the left while I was on the right, but not vice versa. It’s going to take some time to adapt. Also, I’m not sure I completely love the electronic trim. It just lacks a certain amount of feedback that you get with a physical trim wheel. Perhaps it will just take some getting used to. Also, flying a stick with my left hand feels like writing with my left hand. I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal since I’m used to flying with my left hand on the yoke, but the muscle movements are very, very different.

Anyway, I gawked at the 141 knots across the ground indicated by the GPS that we managed in straight and level flight. Faster than a 172 with a much smaller engine. As we neared the airfield, Samuelson took the controls and turned us downwind. He kept the speed up until midfield where he pulled the power to idle. The aircraft is so slick, it doesn’t slow down like a 172 will. We maintained altitude as the airspeed slowly bled off. As we passed our touchdown point, he dropped the flaps, and turned base while putting the aircraft in a slip to lose altitude. He rolled out on short final and actually had to add a little power to fight the sink, and executed a near-perfect touchdown. I couldn’t even see the sink– my only indication was the sound of the wheels hitting the runway.

The good news is that since I didn’t see everything, the lesson is incomplete and I get to do it over again. The more flight time before my check the better.

After the flight, we met the Safety Director for his brief, which took several hours. Considering the challenging flying environment (high field elevation, mountain winds, dry microbursts), it’s amazing that there have been no accidents in the program in its 7 year history. We spent the last hour learning how to open the hangar doors, which are basically glorified garage doors. Why they pay $25,000 a piece for them, I don’t know. They’re bigger than a normal garage door, and the center posts remove so that you can actually get an airplane through them.

So, I’m working dispatch at 0530am tomorrow, and possibly flying in the afternoon.

I came home to find a blog entry with the wife challenging the math of a someone quoted in a Newsweek report. It’s just not a good idea for her to challenge other people’s math. Apparently posting her mispost would be immature and wrong of me.

I will say that she had me momentarily confused. I even cranked up rpncalc in a shell to make sure. “Jonah, aren’t there nine and not eleven?”

Every door at the Air Force Academy has a sign that says FPCON: ALPHA. It’s clearly very, very important. As best I can tell, it’s no different than the terror alert color code warnings. FPCON stands for “Force Protection Condition”. How do they come up with these things? I mean, what does that mean?? Is it really English?

Every Academy telephone has a pad of paper next to it on which you’re supposed to write down bomb threats. I don’t know that the academy has ever HAD a bomb threat. Our tax dollars at work.

At the training today, they passed around stacks of “AF” stickers to be added to badges, which apparently means “Air Field” access. Previously, if you didn’t have an AF on your badge, they printed a new badge with it on it. Now, a sticker is apparently acceptable. It’s one of those self-destructing stickers so that if you try to pull it off, it will tear. Only, it’s a plain blue square with black letters AF on it. I could make one look right with my laser printer no problem, why would I bother pulling one off a badge?

Being the military, they have to come up with stupid names for everything. Someone finally asked what a “Hard Gate” was in the training today. That means it has a padlock on it. As opposed to a cipher gate, which means that you can theoretically wave a pass card in front of it. Only, the cards they give us don’t have the RFID tags in them, so we have to swipe them anyway. And there’s other kinds of gates as well, but I don’t remember what they’re called.

The other side of this is that I get to enjoy the good side of the Air Force. The planes are all clean. They’re so well maintained, it’s hard to tell them apart. The mechanics are agonizingly painstakingly careful. No one flies a wide pattern. The radio calls are all concise and to the point.

Given the rather high-profile nature of my current job and the fact that it’s so difficult to talk about generically, I’m going to have to restrict future job-related posts. The only way I’ve found to do this that makes sense so far is to require users to create accounts and login. After you login, if you accept the cookie, you should stay logged in forever.

If you don’t log in, you’ll simply never see Berck’s job-related posts. After you log in, they should magically appear. Clearly I’ll need to manually authenticate users, so there will be some delay after you register.

So, if you want to read about Berck’s current job, click here to register. After you register, I’ll need to manually promote you to see the hidden posts.

I’m sorry for the obnoxiousness, but I don’t see another alternative. One of the big reasons I haven’t blogged this week is I hadn’t figured out what to do about this issue. I tried writing about it without using specifics, but it just didn’t work. That post has now been hidden and is titled “A busy, tiring week.”

Considering that my new job is rather high-profile, I’m not sure what I’m going to do when it comes to blogging about it. I certainly don’t want anyone involved to stumble across it with a few simple web searches. That in mind, I’ll probably avoid talking about certain searchable specifics. For now. Maybe I’ll make job-related posts viewable only if you log in.

The first potentially major item to mention is that I wasn’t really given the whole story. My employment is contingent on passing training, which doesn’t really surprise me. What does surprise me is that from what I can tell, I get a one-shot chance at a checkride at the end of training, and that many folks apparently don’t pass. It would have been good to know this *before* I moved out here and signed a lease and so on.

What I was told when I met with the chief flight instructor was, “You will start working in dispatch, then we’ll train you, then we’ll give you one student, and another and so on.” He asked when I could start, and I told him as soon as I found a place to live and moved out here. That might have been the time to mention that perhaps I should come out for training first.

The procedures I’ve got to learn are extremely rigid and numerous. There are strict arrival and departure procedures as well as clearly defined practice areas. Well, they’re clearly defined on the map we’re given, but they didn’t bother to paint the lines in the sky. Considering that most of them appear, so far, to be arbitrary, I’m not sure how it all works out. Supposedly after we actually see them from the air, we’ll be able to tell them apart. The training is set up so that we see most things once and nothing more than once. Then we’re tested on it.

I’ve mostly completed the ground training, but haven’t started the flight training. There are 5 flight lessons. I was scheduled to fly today, but I spent 4 hours going through the training, paperwork and generic bureaucratic nonsense required to get my badge to let me on base.

When it comes to security, I don’t think the military has a clue. They don’t seem to realize that no terrorist is going to waste their time attacking this facility. It just wouldn’t make sense. In the meantime, they’re busy making things absurdly difficult for everyone involved. Much like airport security it is, at best, merely the appearance of security.

An example: A gate with a passkey lock recently installed on an access road to the air field. It stopped working, so they’ve been driving around it in the grass.

To get my badge, I had to be trained on how to drive near a runway. Most of the people in the training are construction workers who don’t know the first thing about an airfield, so it makes sense to train them in how to get around it. Unfortunately, it was so vague that I don’t think they still have a clue. They were totally frazzled about the concept of runway names. “Huh? 34 right is the same as 16 left?” I don’t think it really accomplished much for them. And for the 5 or so pilots in there, all of whom operate aircraft on the runway, it was a total waste of time.

I also had to be trained on what to do in a robbery. Seriously. And do you know what the training consisted of? Give a robber whatever he wants. Call 911. Try to remember what the person looked like. And they spent half an hour on that. Really.

I actually did get to fly, but not as a formal part of the training. They let me ride on one of the post-maintenance check flights that consisted of 5 full-stop taxi-back landings. I performed 3 out of the 5 trips around the pattern. The weather was rough with quite a bit of wind shear which is apparently normal operating conditions next to the mountains. I’ve never flown a plane from 6,500ft field elevation, and the first takeoff was disturbing when it came to just how slowly the plane climbed. The terrain seems to rise in most directions from the field as well, so I felt like we were skimming the trees the whole time. The density altitude was about 9,500 ft.

I found flying with a control stick in my left hand somewhat awkward, but I think I’ll get used to it rather quickly. The plane is so incredibly light that it just gets knocked around by everything. It’s also so slick that it doesn’t lose airspeed, ever. All landings are with 45 degrees of flaps, and it still doesn’t like to slow down.

And then there’s the crazy military traffic patterns. You have to request a crosswind turn every trip round the pattern, and then report base. After you land, you do standard exit procedures which involve specific exits from the runway, automatically switching to ground and so on. Most of the stuff like this seems to be good, efficient procedures, just quite different from what I’m used to.

It’s a crazy environment for these kids to learn to fly in. They’re expected to solo after 14 hours. I don’t think I could have made it through the program…

I worked dispatch this morning, which meant I showed up at 5:30am to unlock the place and do dispatch things. That meant that I had to get up at 4:30am which is just too bloody early in the morning. It looks like that’ll be a normal day for me, so I guess I’ll have to get used to going to bed when the sun sets.