June 26, 2005
Graduation
The last few days have been a complete whirlwind. I was so busy that I didn't get a chance to call maintainance about the fact that I lost power in my kitchen (Friday morning) until Sunday morning. Luckily I was almost out of milk and V8 anyway.
So let's see...T-1s was great. I have to say that Texas is just as boring from the air as it is from the ground. ;-) I did get to do one low level over Big Bend, which was pretty cool. I figured it would be beautiful out there, since it's practically New Mexico. For our out and back flight we landed at Ellington Field in Houston, and NASA's Super Guppy (or one of? how many do they have now?) was out on the ramp, so I took a good look and got a nice "squish the guppy" picture.
The T-1 phase was different from all the others in that we were looking out a window and just playing "fly there" with the pilots. That's good, since we didn't do it in other phases. Plus it was fun, kind of like orienteering in the air, though not nearly as fun as that, of course. ;-) The downside of the phase was that the feedback and instruction was basically nonexistant. All the pilots had different ideas about how things should be done, and different expectations, and totally different grading standards. I'm not sure that I really learned much between flights, aside from just having the experience. Seems like if the AF is going to pay for those flights, they should be maximized.
T-1s finished, bringing me to the week of graduation. We had our graduation dinner with a great slide show showing off how much fun we had as a class and the presentation of our aeronautical orders: the first official sheet of paper that said that I was a navigator.
Friday morning was the actual graduation ceremony, which basically went like all the other graduation ceremonies. My parents pinned on my wings and then we ate lots of cake and drank punch.
This is where the whirlwind really kicked in, because I ended up having less time than I thought between graduation and leaving for Fort Sam Houston for the "U.S. Armed Forces Professional Development and Military Skills Training Center". I use quotes because that's such a ridiculously long name that I can't imagine ever speaking it or writing it again. I just call it the camp.
In the first two days we covered each of the 5 pentathlon disciplines. Friday afternoon we did rifle and pistol marksmanship. Saturday morning, after our 800m time trial, we got an introduction to the land obstacle course, then our 50m swim time trial and an intro to the swim obstacle course. In the afternoon we had an intro to orienteering.
Today I can relax, but I think I'll be pretty beat up and tired for most of the next several weeks. Good times, good times.