The Life and times of a Pilot Trainee: Initial Flight Screening

Sorry for such a long break without a post, but for the past month I have been in Pueblo, Colorado for Initial Flight Screening, or IFS for short. It is a screening program designed to mimic the Air Force pilot training environment and is condensed down into a month of flying general aviation aircraft at a facility run by civilian instructors under the supervision of Air Force officers. This post will tell you a little bit about my experience at IFS.

Travel:
From Laughlin AFB most Lieutenants drive rather than commercial air travel because of a few reasons, it is cheaper for the USAF to pay per diem and mileage for 2 driving travel days than it would be to fly, SAT is the closest commercial airport which is 3 hours away in the wrong direction, and if you do fly you will not have a car to use during your month long stay at Doss IFS. So almost all 11 of us drove from Laughlin to Pueblo. Due to the distance being around 750 miles away we had to take 2 days for the drive. So on day 1 we drove to Amarillo, TX. We got there around 7 pm, ate dinner and then retired to our rooms.

At about 11 pm I was awakened by the tornado sirens going off in the town and went downstairs. Turns out that a tornado was coming. Well, to make a long story short, the tornado did not hit our hotel, but there was a lot of golf ball sized hail and my car was pretty badly damaged by the hail. No glass broken or anything so I continued driving it and I am planning on taking it to a body shop in Del Rio tomorrow. Anyways, here are some pictures from that night.

Above is the hail mound that piled up near the door of the hotel

Here is a view of the parking lot. This is Texas in May, not Buffalo in January

It is kind of hard to see in the pictures, but there are little dents all over every metal surface of the car.

Moving on, we made it to the Doss building about 2 pm mountain time and got checked into our hotel rooms which most people share with another guy. In each room there are 2 twin beds, 2 desks, a TV, closet, and a bathroom. After we checked in we had to get in our blues uniform and go show our medical records to the medical tech that works in the small clinic in the building, then we had to have a picture taken by the security company and we were given a badge holder with a card that gets us in the front gate and access to the building which we had to slip our military ID into and wear the badge on the outside of our clothing whenever we were in the building. Then we had to pic up our laptop which contained all the study material and quizzes.

Then we were instructed to go to the cafeteria and eat during the posted meal times. For the rest of that night I looked through the practice quizzes and practiced my boldface and ops limits stuff, which is things about the airplane that we have to memorize. Bold face are actions that need to be done in case of an emergency. These things must be recited or written verbatim when given a test or asked to state the bold face. Ops limits are numbers that correspond to limits of operating the plane, like certain airspeeds, how much oil it takes, and wind limits.

So the next 4 days were filled with academic sessions from 6 am to 4 pm with an hour of physical training scheduled either in the morning or afternoon. During these academic sessions we wore our blues uniforms until our whole flight passed the bold face/ops limits test at the same time. For us that took the second try. Our first try was on the first day of academics, and our second was on the 3rd day. From then on we were permitted to wear flight suits which is also what we wear while flying.

So then we started flying, the first flight in the plane is called the dollar ride because at the end of the flight you are expected to present a dollar to your instructor, decorated if you are so inclined with whatever you want. It is called the dollar ride because that is about the worth of the flight for you because you are unfamiliar with the plane and the instructor basically has to do all the flying so you pay them a dollar for their services.

Each flight lasts about 1.3 hours and during this you practice some landing patterns, and maneuvers in the air such as steep turns, stalls, slow flight, and ground reference maneuvers. The flying is broken up into blocks, C100, C200, C300, C500, C600, C700

I'm not going to lie, I'm getting kind of tired at this point (I did drive 13 hrs in the past 2 days) so I'm going to refer you now to this link on baseops.net so you can learn more about the program so I don't have to type it all out myself.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE GENERIC IFS STUFF!

That will tell you all about what goes on generally at IFS, and now getting back from the program, it is pretty much right. The days are very stressful, and the flights are stressful too. Much more than going down to your local civilian flight school and learning to fly. But at the same time all the instructors are top notch and ready to teach, and here you're getting paid to fly and there is no point after the flight where you have pull out your credit card and drop $200 on your 1.3 hour flight. Plus you get to wear a cool green bag with your name on it and be called Lieutenant.

Now of course we had off on the weekends, so generally everybody spent Friday afternoon/evening drinking in what amounts to the squadron bar which is a lounge inside the facility with some tables, couches, TVs, Xboxes, and stuff. Then usually we found someone sober to drive or called cabs (they're cheap in Pueblo) and went downtown. There are a quite a few bars in downtown Pueblo and festivals were also going on pretty much every Friday night during the summer so we had a lot of fun. Saturdays we usually did something outside. One weekend we went to Pike's Peak and the Air Force Academy, and another we went out to a nearby lake, and other Saturdays we just kinda hung around and maybe went to see a movie. It is really good to get out of the Doss building because chances are during the week you probably never left or even went outside unless you were flying.

Here are some pictures from Pike's Peak and the AF Academy: