Week 29 (20 - 26 Aug 06)

First of all, I forgot to mention I had our final class patch design completed a few weeks ago. What you see is our final design. The "Toaster Testers" comes from our favorite professor, JJ, talking about toaster programmers, who just blindly write code without understanding the ramifications, and leading to airplane crashes. Anyhow, we've become known as the Toaster Testers... more details on this over a beer when we see each other.

8/22 - My first flight with Rusty. Up to this point, I'd flown with every fixed-wing pilot in Class 130 but Rusty. Now, I've got them all. We flew our Spin Exercise Flight in Tester 25 (can I never get away from this ONE particular T-2???). Great hop with lots of spins! It was a telemetered flight, with some of our buds watching the data roll in to the ground station. I think one of our spins resulted in a high speed spiral, which felt wierd. We were both thrown forward into our straps, and I could feel the g's building rapidly... not to much fun for that, and I'd not want to repeat it anytime soon.

8/23 - Lat-Dir exercise flight #2 with SLAB in Tester 10 for 0.9 hour flight.
8/24 - First H-60 flight! Flew my VTOL 2 Demo flight with Pupalakis and PinkF. That helo is so augmented, anyone can fly it. Amazing how little it really took to control it. The auto hover feature was way cool at 100 ft off the Patuxent River. The total flight was 2.1 hours long, but I only logged a 1.0.

8/25 - Flight test practice with OD doing air-to-ground and air-to-air work in Tester 10 for 1 hour.

-Vanna