Alright, finally, I am back at the blog writer. At the time of my last post, I was finishing up my BI sims. Luckily, those went off without a hitch, and I was able to get back into the plane. After the sims, we do three BI flights with us actually flying in the rear cockpit. The instructor takes the forward cockpit and does most of the flying into and out of the working areas. It was pretty cool watching the instructors go through the procedures which I am used to doing. They fly through the checklists and knock stuff out pretty quick. Once at altitude, I threw the hood over (which I of course found a way to make way more complicated than it should be...took about 5 mins the first time I tried to use it) and took the controls to fly my maneuvers.

My last BI flight was scheduled as an out-and-in with a mandatory warm-up. No worries, translation to follow. An out-and-in just means we conduct one flight event on our way to another airport, land, take a break, grab a bite, and knock a second event out on the way back to NAS Corpus. The mando warm-up is something they give us if we go 14 days or more without flying in the front cockpit. It is basically a "free" flight. We have a normal brief, but the grades do not count like a normal flight. It helps a ton. It was pretty cool to get away from the rest of the training squadrons and drop into a smaller municipal airport for a quick bite.

The next two days I got back into the regular graded flights. They were pretty exciting for me because I could tell that I was finally showing significant improvement. The mando warm-up allowed me to knock some of the rust off...trust me, there was a LOT of rust. However, it all paid off in my next two flights. To date, they have been the best I have flown so far. I am getting into the heavy build-up to my solo, which could happen as soon as a week and a half from now...wow...that thought is somewhat daunting. The flights focus on handling in flight emergencies, recovering from out-of-control flight and spins (which are wayyyy cooler than I thought they would be, though my stomach is still trying to get used to them), and working the landing pattern constantly.

I get back into the plane tomorrow after an awesome weekend going back to Annapolis to see my sponsor father do the flyover at the Navy vs. Temple game and having a mini-reunion with my buddies. It was pretty weird seeing good ol' USNA without being a mid anymore. I can't believe how fast the time has gone. Anyways, I am gonna go hit the books. Hope things are going well for everyone. Take care.

Chris