BFT - Basic Flight Training

This is where all the new pilots go to learn how to fly military style. Doesn't matter if you will be selected helo or jets, you still have to go through this phase. On average this course takes about 9 months but if you're lucky (e.g. the weather always cooperates, there aren't too many broken planes, you or your instructor don't get sick, etc.) you could finish it in as short as 6 months.



The course starts off with ground school where you learn everything you need to know about flying, military regulations, weather, etc. The courses you will be taking are:

- AOIs: Aircraft Operations Instructions (everything about the Harvard)
- ADY: Aerodynamics
- Aircraft Technical: avionics, electrics, hydraulics (general to all aircraft)
- Meteorology (a.k.a. MET)
- IFP (Instrument Flight Procedures)
- Navigation
- Air Regulations

It's a lot of work considering that you also have to memorize the checklist for the Harvard (red and white pages) during this time. What some students do is memorize these before starting the course. This helps A LOT! So the ground school lasts about 3 months. The first 2 weeks is all classroom but eventually you start flying and ground school becomes part time. Normally half day of classes and half day of flying which means 4 hours of lectures in the morning and maybe a flight in the afternoon. If you're not on the schedule to fly you still have to be in school (in the ready room) but at least you can use that time to study.

They are pretty strict and you always need to report your whereabouts. So even if you're not on the schedule you can't just go home. There is a board in the ready room with all of the students' names and if you get cleared to, lets say, go to the gym or for lunch, you need to write it down, including the name of the instructor who let you go. It used to be that you could just go and study at home but some douchebags abused this luxury and screwed it up for the rest of us. Some guy missed his flight because he was sleeping at home! So now people joke around that you have to get cleared even to go for a leak.

Another thing that's mandatory is regular visits to the gym. There is a sign-in sheet which the instructors check every week. The requirement is to have a minimum of 8 one hour visits to the gym during the month. This however includes other sports like running, swimming or organized games like hockey, soccer etc.

More on the course. Just like in Portage (the first flight training phase) you do have a laptop here as well. Some of the course content is online but the CBTs are not as extensive.

Another big part of the course are the simulators. Initially you train on them to find all the switches and figure out all the equipment but later on you actually "fly" in them as well. So before your first actual flight you will do at least 5 sims. They are pretty advanced and you have to be prepared for each mission just as if it was the real flight. You are being coached and graded by a non military instructor (but 99% of them are ex-military) and if you don't do well in these you can't go flying. All of them are prerequisites to actual flights. From some of these missions you will be coming out soaked, it gets hot in there, especially since you're wearing the same outfit as in the plane including the helmet. Just like in the actual aircraft missions you are graded based on your performance starting from Standard Exceeded (a.k.a. Snake), High Standard, Achieved Standard, Low Standard, Marginal, Unsat.

The school is divided into three flights, Apache, Bandid and Cobra. These are the Phase II students. They do that simply to have a smaller number of people to manage. There might be anywhere from 20 to 60 students in one flight at any given time. Then there is the Dragon flight for the next phase on the Hawk, for those going jets.

What's cool about this place is that it's a NATO training center. This means that students from other countries like Hungary, Australia or Singapore are also trained here. Our course of 16, for example, had 4 Aussies. One funny story is how I was confused with being a Hungarian by our CO, during his lecture on "knowing your troops", how ironic ;) Must have been my accent. He asked me during the lecture "... and how is it in Hungary". I'm like: "Sir, but I am Canadian" and then an awkward silence in the classroom. I guess everyone was taken by surprise, not only me :)

The Australian students were the craziest ones. Not sure if they are like that all the time or maybe they just go nuts while on the course in Canada. There are so many stories but I won't bore you too much, just mention the better ones. Like jokes they used to play on other students in training. This one guy came back from a flight to find someone has tampered with his jacket. He then realized that all the cards from his wallet were missing. After a little search and talking to fellow pilots he found out the frozen glass of water in the freezer, with all his wallet contents in it. Another time one guy couldn't find his flight jacket until someone handed him a package wrapped up in duct tape. He wasn't sure what it was, this small (smaller than a football) hard packed ball. It turned out the Aussies, with all their might, have compressed his jacket into this unimaginable size and wrapped it up in tape, A LOT of tape :). I'll mention one more. This is quite funny. I wasn't there but apparently a fellow was tied to a rolling chair (with duct tape again lol) and pushed into the instructors' lounge. And let me tell you one thing. That place is off limits to students. So what did they do? They pushed him in there and run. What's more funny is that the instructors didn't get upset, they just rolled him out and pushed him off to the lobby and just left him there. Poor guy lol. But just so you know, he wasn't too upset, he was just another one of the jokers, I'm guessing the weakest one ;)



The rest of this posting on Moose Jaw are my notes from the diary including some cool photographs.


Sat - Jan 12, 2008

I am all moved in and well in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. The drive from Ottawa was very pleasant as I drove through US and had 6 days to travel. Chicago was definitely the highlight of my trip. In total my car and I endured 3617 km of all kinds of weather including snow storms, black ice and even freezing rain. Thanks to early warnings such as cars in ditches I was always lucky to slow down in time :)

I'm here to start my second phase of flight training on a more advanced airplane. It's gonna be a tough course but I'm looking forward to some challenge. Plus, at the end (in about 7 months) I will find out what type of aircraft I will be flying in the future. If I get jets, there is no waiting for the following course. I continue for another 4 months here and then I go to Cold Lake, Alberta, for a year of training on a CF-18 Hornet.

As a matter of fact there is a show on Discovery channel that just started last week and it's about the 3rd training phase. Watch it if you have time, it's very interesting. You can get a better idea of what we do here :) Here is the link to the information about the show:

http://www.discoverychannel.ca/jetstream

I live with another student in a townhouse, which is part of the military housing. Guess how much the rent is here, $425 per month lol






Sat - Feb 16, 2008

I finally squeezed out few minutes to write some news. I've been very busy with ground school and we also started flying last week. It's quite a workload, days are long, sometimes 12 hours (that's the legal limit). After school it's time to eat and back to the books or chair flying. Two weeks ago we finally had our welcome party. We had to dress up ridiculously funny and follow through with ridiculous games which included spinning, running, racing, all this with some beers or shots in between. That was an initiation :) Here are some pictures from the party and from the water entry training.








My first flight was awesome even though I got a bit sick. The plane is amazing, it has enough power to go straight up for quite a bit. But it's a complicated piece of machinery. Even before I get in I need to check about 75 places to make sure everything is in place, once I'm in and the ejection seat is secure I will complete another 75 checks from memory before I can start moving. Similar story in the air. You're always busy, if you stop and think you can relax for a second you are probably forgetting something. No time is wasted. Right now I just hope that my stomach gets used to all the G forces quick so that I can concentrate on learning. In our "ready room" there is a board where everyone marks an X once a mission is completed. This includes simulators as well as flights. I'm 7 X's in to a total of a 100 :)

Here is a picture of my class (ground school portion).



Ok, back to some more studying. I need to memorize how high to fly over fur farms, bird sanctuaries or "sensitive citizens" areas lol


Mar, 2008

Good news, just passed my first flight test and did my first solo on Thursday. It feels really awesome, especially because I'm the first solo of the course. It was really cool zooming around the circuit, on a late afternoon. No one else was flying since most people left early for their Easter break. It was quite cloudy but the visibility was good enough for a solo, it even rained a bit but that didn't worry me much. At any point I was always within a few minutes from the runway. It was strange to fly this expensive plane around, all by myself, without anyone yapping from the back seat :) BTW, they tell us it costs approximately $4000 per hour to fly this thing.

I finally got over the G forces and I can now enjoy each flight and not be exhausted at the end. The Harvard is a World War II fighter. I was reminded of that on one of my first flights by my instructor who said "c'mon now, you gotta be more aggressive, this is the big boys' plane, fly it like you mean it" ;) You can be very aggressive with it, it can pull a maximum of 7.5 G's (this is when your body weighs 7.5 times the regular weight). So I'm very excited because the next thing we gonna learn is aerobatics.

Did I mention the cost of each of these babies? 9 million bucks, and guess what, 1.5 million is for the ejection seats. The ejection handle is right between my legs. Normally there is a safety pin that prevents anyone from pulling on it, but as soon as we strap in that pin comes out. There is also a switch that can be set to either BOTH or SOLO position. Just before take-off we set it to BOTH, meaning: if at least ONE handle is pulled, both pilots get ejected. So you can imagine when on the first trip my instructor was like "whatever you do DO NOT touch that handle". People are sensitive, especially after last year's incident where a student unwillingly ejected while still on the ground (lucky for his instructor the switch was in the SOLO position ;) I'm attaching a cool picture of an ejection at some airshow in the states. The second picture shows our jet trainer in which the student forgot to lower the landing gear. This happened not too long ago, the student was so busy that he didn't even hear the warning tones (something we call "having a helmet fire").




My next solo will be outside of the airport so I'm planning to bring my camera and take some cool photos!


Apr, 2008

Hello, not much news from here except yesterday's airplane crash that happened just before my solo flight. The pilots ejected safely and only the student broke his arm. It was quite a show, big fireball at the end of the runway and, thank god, two open canopies floating not far above.

It started with a 2 bell emergency. These are announced in every building on the base through the intercom system. 2 bells are very common, minor aircraft problems or bird strikes, after which the pilots return immediately to the base. So the initial announcement was "T6 failure on a Hawk airframe". Few minutes later, big bang and one long bell.

Whenever there is a crash we are all quarantined in the building and no one is allowed to make any calls or use the internet. The reason is that they don't want any information leaking to the news before they can notify the families of the pilot(s). Kind of sucks because people on the outside are worried wondering who it was, and we can't even call and let them know we are ok. This lasted about 2 hours.

On Monday they gonna tell us exactly what happened but so far we know that for some reason the engine failed on take-off (probably ingested a bird). The pilots tried turning around and landing but they weren't high enough and therefore didn't make the runway. Here is an article from CBC:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/04/18/pilots-sask.html


May, 2008

It's been a while since I last wrote. It's because the course keeps me very busy. Good news is that we are past the half way mark (~50 flights out of a 100) and about 2 months from finishing.

Today me and my instructor started doing aerobatics. I did a roll, a loop, and a "cuban 8" which is a combination of two loops and two rolls. Not long ago we also started practising spins. These are quite violent, especially during the recovery, you get thrown around the cockpit a bit. It's quite crazy how fast you loose altitude. Apparently in the past, fighter pilots used a spin to break through clouds (i.e. once the instruments showed they were above the airport they would simply spin down until they saw the runway and landed).

Since the crash there weren't any major incidents other than few more dead birds. There was one other thing that probably scared one of my friends quite a bit. Him and his instructor were getting ready for landing when they didn't get the confirmation that the landing gear was down and locked (the usual 3 green lights did not illuminate). Another aircraft confirmed the gear was down but this does not confirm if it is actually locked (i.e. it could fold on landing). So they had to circle around a lake for 2 hours till they burnt all the fuel and prepared for emergency landing. They landed safely, it turned out to be an electrical problem. The switch that is suppose to be turned on when landing gear is extended was not working.


Jun, 2008

I will start on a sad note just because it's something that surprised not only me but everyone else in the school. Last week one of the students attempted suicide. I personally don't know the guy which makes it a little easier but it was a huge eye opener for many of us. It happened after a solo party at which students and their instructors celebrate the first solo flights. I've been to one of these before and they're quite funny, especially once people get drunk. So in a nutshell, each student goes up on a podium and the instructor makes jokes about his first flights. The student then goes on to talk about his instructor's mistakes, funny stories, etc. Apparently this new young instructor really took it too far and started putting the student down by saying things like, you're dumb, just a bag of hammers, you won't make it thru the course, etc. Well, turns out the kid had other issues in his life so after having quite a few drinks that night he decided to take his life. Thank god some of his friends got to him in time. Wow, I still can't believe it.

And now on a happier note, well, it wasn't funny when it happened... The other day I was just shutting down the engine after my solo flight and guess what, instead of turning the battery off I inadvertently hit another switch which is used to motor the turbine (kind of like cranking your car engine without fuel). Right away the ground crew guy started yelling (thinking I'm starting the engine while he's under the plane) so what do I do next, instead of putting that switch back to normal I thought it would be better to turn the battery off. For some reason the plane didn't like that and just kept making weird noises. Turns out I fried some relay switch. Oh well, tax money will pay for it :) Oh, one day before this incident I put another plane out of commission. This time it simply broke on its own while we were flying. Basically a warning light came on, indicating engine malfunction and we had to land as soon as possible. It wasn't major but still quite scary (in my head I was thinking of my next step if the engine died).



It's interesting how often you check the weather forecast for things like wind direction or strength when flying. Something you normally don't care about but if you are scheduled to fly the wind direction will tell you what runway will be in use, temperature and clouds will tell you if it will be smooth or bumpy, and rain might mean icing at higher altitudes. For example, lately we've been noticing that the winds are unusually easterly (i.e. from the East). Most students don't like that cause it means using a runway that we are not used to and making all the turns to the right (for some reason most people prefer turning left :)

So I passed my aerobatics and traffic pattern test on Friday. Very happy cause that was one of the harder ones. This means I'm starting navigation phase this week. Really looking forward to it. For each flight I have to print out a map, draw my path to the target, with timings, fuel estimates, etc. The goal of each flight is to "hit" (i.e. fly over) the target within 30 sec. Quite challenging because I will have to constantly adjust my speed in the air so that my ground speed is constant. And that's if I don't get lost. Sometimes what's on the map is not necessarily on the ground (or vice versa). What's cool about these flights is the speed and how close we are to the ground. Travelling at 450 km/h at 500 feet above ground sounds pretty exciting!


Jul, 2008

I'm currently in the navigation phase. The way it works is we fly at approximately 500 feet above ground and look for targets. It's pretty challenging at first because we can't use the altimeter to tell us the height above ground, it's just impossible because the elevation changes all the time and what we see on the altimeter is height above sea level. So it is necessary to develop a good sight picture and basically be able to judge visually the 500 foot distance. It's funny what they told us to look for. For example, at 500 feet you should be able to see cows but not their legs. Or other tips like cars without wheels, or being able to recognize windows on houses but not being able to see through them, in other words, if you can see thru them or if you can distinguish legs on cows then you know you're too low.



The other day we were coming back from a nav sortie and got caught by a thunderstorm. It hung around the airport for quite a bit and we were forced to circle around in the training area. Eventually we were running low on fuel and I could tell the instructor was starting to worry. He asked me to make some calculations, to see if we had enough fuel to go to another airport (in Saskatoon, since Regina also had bad weather). Guess what, we didn't! Luckily though, the storm moved out and we landed with the exact minimum allowed by regulations. Ooof! Quite an experience.

--- End of notes from the diary

As you can see the course is a lot of fun. What my notes don't talk about are the last 2 phases. Basically you do more instrument flying after the nav phase and the last one is formation. Once all the phases are done you are then put back in the waiting game. Also, towards the end of the course there is a selection party where you find out the answer to your biggest question: what will I be flying? The way it works is that during the course you have two interviews where you are asked your preference (jets, helo or multi). At the end, however, the instructors and few other officials from the air command bang their heads together and determine our future in the military. On my course, for example, most students were selected for the helo course. There were 2 very happy students that got their multi slot and 1 very unhappy student that was selected for jets. In total there were 4 students put on jets. Sometimes also what happens is that they will take few of those "jet" guys and tell them to instruct first. Below is some more info on these courses.

The Hawk Course

The NATO flying course here in Moose Jaw is also known as Phase II Alpha, and it is flown on the Harvard. All student pilots go through this phase, i.e. all future helicopter (helo), transport (multi) and fast movers (jets). Those selected for CF-18's go onto Phase II Bravo, which is basically an extension of the Harvard course and lasts about 2 to 4 months. Following II Bravo is the Hawk course. That could last anywhere from 4 to 6 months. And it does not get any easier for our future jet pilots. Not only must they familiarize themselves and get a hang of the new airframe, they must also master the new course material. I was told by one of my buddies that the pressure is greater than on Phase II Alpha because the instructor pilots expect that the aircraft control is already there and therefore demand quick progress through the course sylabus. But in reality the aircraft is different and it takes more than few flights to get used to the new plane.

FIS

FIS stands for Flight Instructor School. It's another department here at the Air Force Base in Moose Jaw and it's where new instructor pilots (IP's) are being produced. One of my friends has just went through about 6 months of training at FIS. So how do you end up here you ask? Well, he finished Phase II Alpha and put down "jets" as his first choice. However, what he got offered was: jets with a "but". What I mean is that he will eventually get them but he must first do a tour of instructing here at Moose Jaw. It's really a good gig if you don't mind living here for 3 to 4 years. First of all you don't get deployed (some might prefer that, especially those with families, kids, etc.) and you get to fly A LOT (unlike in some other tours in the CF). You will be flying daily and you will also get the satisfaction of teaching new pilots. So anyways, the FIS course is not easy, it's probably one of the toughest, and they don't pick just anyone. The student must show potential of being an instructor, must have good people skills and on top of it all be a damn good pilot! When my buddy did his course he had to study even during his holidays. They were flying 6 days a week, and he barely had enough time to prepare for his tests. You can pretty much forget about social life during the course but once you start teaching, with time, it gets easier. However, even the instructing tour can be overwhelming as there is never enough IP's. For just one flight, you need to prepare a lesson brief, hold the brief (which is at least one hour), go flying (~1.5 hrs), hold a debrief (another hour or so) and once the student is dismissed, complete a detailed lesson report. An instructor can easily have 3 students in one day!

PFT Extended

One more thing that I need to mention is the PFT Extended course that they are now offering to some students. In 2008 it was an experimental course but it might become a norm eventually. Basically you continue your second phase in Portage (instead of going to Moose Jaw and flying the Harvard). It's basically a way for the military to save some money. It was a good deal for some of my friends because they didn't have to wait as much for their second phase and therefore got their wings much quicker. But they never got to fly the Harvard which SUCKs big time because it's an amazing machine.

Read on to find out more about the training of a Canadian Air Force pilot.


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