TACANS, VORs, Approach Plates, Jet Logs, Oh My!

I've finally (after a month and a half) finished formation flying. It's been a blast and I already miss it. I don't, however miss the one-flight-a-week plan I'd been on. I ended "Forms" last week with an "out and in" which is our term for flying two flights ("Xs" as we call them) in one day. I flew as lead all the way to College Station, TX, the home of what some would call the famous Texas Agriculture and Mines(?)... er A&M University. It was great and it was not only the first time since Las Cruces that I'd left the Corpus Christi Area but also the first time I'd seen a real, living non-palm tree since probably my last time in Connecticut. We got a burrito in the middle of town and then went back to the airport and flew back to NAS Corpus doing formation wingovers and steep turns all the way.

It was a cruise formation flight, which is different from the flying depicted in the above video. It's more "tactical" meaning that we're more concerned about getting from point A to B and putting the aircraft through its' paces than staying close and looking good.... in other words it was way more fun. During a wingover I'd be in a 90-degree angle of bank and my wingman would be above me off my wing and coming in, so I'd have to fight the urge to turn away which, since we were turning and falling, would close the distance between us. Instead, I'd turn into him, giving me a larger turn radius which made me fall behind him. It was a lot of fun, and the instructors were great about letting us do a lot of them to get the idea down.

Right now, I'm starting Radio Instrument Navigation Ground School. It's as cool as it sounds. Actually it is pretty interesting, it's the training I need to fly like the airline pilots do, in the clouds, very high up and without being able to see the ground. It's the way we use what amounts to lighthouses... but in radio form to navigate from beacon to beacon across the U.S. and the world. Additionally we also are learning how to land in these conditions, how these radio beacons guide us into our unseen airports and how we use their information to descend and put ourselves in the right position to land safely. Overall it'll be pretty fascinating, but I can't wait to get through it, not just because it involves absolute precision to the point of tedium and nothing near the maneuvers I learned to love in aerobatics but also because it's the last unit before I select and can move on to the next step and the next aircraft.