54 Weeks To Go!

I probably shouldn't remind myself of that but oh well. Not a bad rest of the week - aerospace physiology is pretty interesting, discussing the different effects flying can have on your body and how to combat these. We spent a morning practicing how to safely egress the plane and more so how to properly land if you were to parachute down. We used to do a parasail thing to simulate it better but they decided more students were getting hurt on the parasail than would ever actually have to eject out of an airplane - smart decision.

We spent some time on the barany chair which is used to simulate the different effects of flying and spatial disorientation that can occur by spinning you in circles at about 30 rpm. The chair also has a 2nd function of being used to combat air sickness by spinning for ten minutes 3 times a day, 3 days a week. Apparently it's a hellish program and I'm praying I don't get sick in the T-6 because it would most certainly not be fun to go through that (The point is to throw up a lot)

We touched on vision night vision, the threats of high altitude, acceleration, stress awareness and also did the Fighter Aircrew Test which is a bunch of muscular exercises they use and give you a score and it's supposed to determine if your "in shape enough" to perform high G force maneuvers. The test is pretty bogus and apparently a high score doesn't necessarily correlate to a high tolerance to G's - according to the instructors. But it was easy enough and all I had to do was pass it and since I already know I'm flying heavies I'll never have to do it again.

A bunch of guys(+1 girl) in the class went out friday night and had a good time. Josh and I went to San Antonio for the weekend and saw the Mummy 3(?) - it wasn't bad and we had a good time hanging out at the river walk. I found some good margaritas and Josh found some good Pepsi's :) Aaran and his family were going to meet up with us for dinner but got delayed in some bad traffic on their way back from Ikea near Austin so Aaron met up with us around 1030 and we hung out for a few hours and had a good time.

Tonight I'll be studying for my physiology exam tomorrow afternoon and then the Phillies are on ESPN @7C so I'll probably have to watch that. We get in the Oxygen chamber tomorrow to see the effects of hypoxia and high altitude. That will finish up physiology and we move on to the systems of the T-6 which should be interesting and at least I'll finally feel like I'm learning about something to do with flying the T-6!

I'll be in touch!