For those of you who don’t know I was commissioned in May as an Ensign in the US Navy and transfered to Pensacola to begin training as a Naval Aviator. After five months of waiting to begin my training I finally started IFS last Monday, 1 OCT 2007. IFS is a program in which the Navy sends me to a local airport to complete civilian private pilot ground school and log 25 flight hours in a Cessna 172. There are five airports in the Pensacola area in which one can complete IFS and the airport I got was Destin, FL. The school is pretty small and the instructors are really cool. The only problem is I have to drive about an hour and half each way to get to the school for my flight training. Somedays the drive really bothers me but it also gives me a lot of time to think and listen to sermons on my radio.

Last week Monday to Friday, I completed the required 35 hours of civilian ground school needed for IFS. Let me say that cramming all of civilian ground school in a week long course is like drinking water from a fire hydrant. It was intense, luckily for me I had a background of Aeronautical Engineering to fall back on and had already went through ground school once in college. But, I survived and passed all the exams with flying colors and started flying the next week.

Monday was my first flight in IFS and to put in mildly it went pretty well. At my school they have you jump into flying both feet first. From my first flight I taxied the aircraft, took off the aircraft, flew the aircraft and landed the aircraft. I did not expect that they would make us do these things from the get go. I thought my instructor would take care of the taxing, takeoff and landing; I was wrong. However, I did these things and we managed to taxi, takeoff and land safely but it was far from pretty.

Tuesday was my second flight and it went better than Monday’s flight. Tuesday we did a lot of touch and goes and it seemed that my taxing, takeoffs and landings were improving. Yesterday was my third flight and again it went better than the previous two days flights. We also did slow and dirty flight, power on and off stalls and then did a touch and go and landing. Todays flight went alright in my opinion. Again we did slow and dirty flight, power on and off stalls. My instructor then demonstrated steep banked turns and power off emergency landings. We returned and did a touch and go that went pretty well, however the winds were direct crosswind and I was fighting the winds all the way down. Then we went back around the pattern and did a power off simulated emergency landing that was by far a bad landing. I felt like I had no clue what I was doing, trying to maintain airspeed for best glide, fight the winds, and manage to line up with the runway. I fly tomorrow so maybe tomorrow will be better than today.

Here are some pictures I took during Tuesdays flight.

Standing in Front of Cessna 172 N53456

Self Portrait from Backseat of the Airplane

Destin Airport after Takeoff

Destin Area from Airplane

Destin Airport Coming in for a Landing

Sunset from the Airplane

Another Sunset from the Airplane