Practice, Practice

 24 January 1995
Tuesday 
2005L

 

Flying over to Rickenbacker in SKE formation, trying to get paid. Weather was too bad for airdrops, so we decided to get the SKE requirements done by flying high level over to Rickenbacker, low approach, SKE back and shoot the approach to a landing. SKE (Station Keeping Equipment) is the radio equipment that detects other aircraft in your formation and provides a radar-like display of everyone’s relative position in a formation, and gives you guidance on how to stay in position off the lead aircraft. Takes some getting used to, but for “high” altitude (NOT terrain contour flying) formation flying, it works pretty slick.

I’m flying with Jim Froelich, another Nav, and letting him take the first half. It’s so hard to find time to write that I cherish the 30 minutes I get to sit in the back and put a few thoughts on paper.

Dying has been on my mind a lot lately – through no fault of my own. Laura and I watched “My Life,” the other night. It’s a movie where Michael Keaton learns he’s going to die from cancer in a few months, so he rushes to get his life in order, and strives to hang on long enough to see his baby being born.

They’re releasing the transcript of the voice recorder from the crash of USAIR 457. It is chilling to hear/see the final moments as the pilots discover something is wrong, and they fight desperately to save the airplane. 

I think I know how they felt. 

When I was in high school, I went to the F-4 Air-to-Air Simulators at Luke AFB, where Dad worked. He let me fly them, and as expected I would crash on a regular basis.

They were so real to me that I would struggle violently with the stick and rudder as the plane went out of control and I’ll never forget the sickening, blood-draining feeling of realization that the plane was about to crash and there was nothing I was going to be able to do to stop it. 

Eventually you get to the point where you know you can just restart the Sim, but those first couple times are gut-wrenching for a young teen who took all this very seriously. But I slowly got the hang of it. On one of my last rides, I somehow got into a crazy flat spin. Things didn’t look good, but I yanked and banked and kicked the rudder all over the place until I flew out of it! 

Not bad for a kid with no flying lessons!