Not all fun and games
Alright, it’s hard for me to write a sad story about flying without someone dying. But.. yeah.
I just got out of my first simulator lesson. I swear, if the training doesn’t get me, my body will. I’m in the simulator from midnight till 4 a.m. for the next two weeks - this is the first time I’ve worked the back side of the clock. This morning, I looked at the syllabus for tonight’s lesson and thought it was a cake walk. Tonight, halfway through my turn flying, I was ready to quit… just kill the motion, drop the gang plank so I can walk out, get in my car and go home. I’d return to a life of living from paycheck to paycheck as a mechanic or maybe as a pilot with some shadetree outfit.
Cropdusting. Pipelines. Fisheries. Banners. Anything would be an improvement over this.
The fault is mine, there’s no arguing it. I was almost asleep this afternoon and the phone rang. Couldn’t go back to sleep. I’ll turn my phone back on sometime next month after my checkride… I guess.
Anyway. I missed callouts when monitoring, missed stuff right and left when flying. we got slammed with stuff left and right. Stalls: Approach, cruise, departure; landings: Ils/Flight director, ILS/raw data, Visual; all sorts of stuff I’d walked through, but in the sim, I was simply a wreck. Cockpit flows I memorized and had cold in the paper tiger, were a struggle in the plane. Checks that should have taken seconds took full minutes; it took us 45 minutes to get the plane ready to go from the gate.
It’ll get better. It has to.. for now, though, I gotta get some sleep.