Dictionary>Ok, so I guess I won't blog every flight if I fly 4 times in one week, plus a simulator but here's a summary. Wednesday and Thursday were with HMM-265 our sister squadron down the st
reet, and the first was a night CAL/TERF flight to make their pilots NSQ LLL, basically quallified to carry troops when it'd dark as sin out there. The second was a day TERF (terrain flight as low as 50 feet over the ground/trees/river or whatever you're flying over.) One of these days I'll take my camera out there (not during an initial “x" flight though) and show you guys what it looks like, it's actually a lot of fun, but we don't do it because it's fun, we do it because North Korea (or pick your third world country enemy) wants to shoot us down and we don't want to get shot down. Anyway, both 265's pilots did well, one had been there over a year and the other just a couple months.
My last hop was in the simulator with one of my pilots at 262, and he didn't do well. It was an annual instrument check ride, i.e. I was evaluating his ability to fly on the instruments. I won't say any more than that.
All in all it's pretty fun to be an instructor pilot, and I hope to go to flight school next and train new Sailors and Marines, maybe even Coasties, how to fly either the T-34, or TH-57.
I think one of the best things about being an instructor is you learn so much yourself, because when you teach it, you've really got to know it. You also get to invest in other people's lives and that is also pretty cool for lack of a better word. Well I hope to put some more photos on the blog, because I'm sure they're more fun to look at than this is to read. I use to fly with a camera all the time in Iraq, but I haven't in a little while, so I'll probably start again.
peace.