It’s turkey-day.   Finally, a bit of rest for the weary.   Everyone in UPT has Thursday and Friday off to celebrate the holiday.   It couldn’t have come at a better time, because I have been flying my tail off.  Remember, I am not really complaining, just trying to make you understand the work load involved.   If I had to work everyday of the week, I would do it, because I enjoy flying.  

            While I have the wife in the kitchen cooking up some good food for us to take over to the Class Thanksgiving feast (Between 25-30 people), I figured I’d write and let you know what has been happening in UPT.  

            Since I was slightly behind on the flying schedule, with only 3 flights over 3 weeks, and partly because I went DNIF and partly because the scheduling sucked, I have been flying every day.   Multiple times a day in some cases.   It’s pretty cool to

“Double-turn”, but it does take some getting used to.   When everyone first got to UPT one flight would pretty much knock you down mentally for an entire day.   The speed at which thinking moves while in the plane, is intense at first.  Then I had a flight and a simulator afterwards.   That was kinda funky cause it was an Emergency Procedure simulator where all that happens is the guy tries to kill you.   I had to eject something like 5 times.   So that was rough.   I felt like a big lump-of-crap afterwards because I was so fried. 

Alas I digress, the real point here is double turning.   It was fun because the first time that I did it, we had some serious cloud cover from about 2200 feet up to about 6500, which as you can guess meant that I could fly actual instrument conditions for awhile.   For the non-pilot types who stumble on this site (and have made it this far without being bored to tears), instrument flying is when you can’t see anything outside (ie. in the clouds) and you have to use your instruments to tell you which way is up, down, left or right.   It’s a dangerous situation for someone who doesn’t know how to do it properly (JFK jr rings a bell).   But anyway, it was fun, except I learned real fast how screwed up you can get in the clouds.  I’m flying along and SHIT! I look at my attitude indicator and while even though both the IP and I felt as if we were in straight and level flight, we were actually in about a 60 degree bank turn.   Yipes.   It’s all good, we fixed it, I paid much closer attention and we got to where we were going.

            Let’s talk about something cool.  I learned from a very important pilot that you can tell a good pilot, who loves to fly, by one simple little test.  And I got to take the test the other day in the clouds.  To quote that well-traveled pilot, “When passing through clouds, if I am flying with a guy who will briefly level off right above the top of the clouds and fly as if the clouds are the ground and he/she is 10 feet above them, then I know that this dude really is a true pilot”  and conversely “The dude who just keep climbing right up, plows through the top of the clouds, is a moron and is just driving his bus with wings”.   This is what we did on Monday.   I was just breaking through the clouds, climbing for a higher altitude and I nosed the jet over and just skimmed the clouds, at 200 knots.   Man it was cool!   The coolest was right before I was about to climb, the IP said “okay, enough fun, lets get up to the altitude (he knew what I was doing).  Right before I did, the was a cloud formation a bit higher than where we were and *poof*, we punched a hole in it.    Much fun, and I recommend cloud buzzing to everyone.

            We had some students solo already.   Pretty cool except the dunk-tank is butt-ass cold and I know those students had it better than I will, seeing as if the weather holds, I will solo next week.  Early December even in Del Rio is pretty crisp.   Hey, no reason to complain, I will just be happy to have gone solo.   Solo seems to be easier for everyone because you don’t have an IP telling you everything that you are screwing up so you can hear the radios much better and concentrate on not boning up your pattern. 

            On a side note, my assigned IP, it was his first time to solo a student (he is new) so we threw his ass in the dunk tank too.  Hehehe.  It was great! I’m telling him, as we are draggin' his student towards the tank that he should get in the background so that when they threw her in, that he would be in the background.   So he said “yeah that’s cool”.  I told him he’d better hurry so he would get there, so he ran, HAHAHAHA he ran towards the tank, and as soon as he got there, I grabbed him and we dunked his ass.   Aw man, it was great! 

            Well, I better get going, I hear the wife getting pissed at the turkey and I smell that familiar burning-the-house-down smell.   Later.

Ps- Today I am thankful that I have a beautiful wife and that I am in UPT.