It's mid-november and we're coming near to the end of the hurricane season. However, we can't relax just yet. It wasn't long ago we flew a series of investigations into Hurricane Paloma. This was all for research because the storm was never forecast to hit any U.S interests. Scientists from the Hurricane Research Division (HRD) came and investigated the rapid intensification of Paloma.
This was a big series of flights for me. I only flew on Thursday and Friday nights (the 6th and 7th), but these were the first flights I got to fly on my own. Yep. Not as a trainee, but as the only Flight Director on the aircraft. This is only for the GIV at this time. They want me to do a few flights on the P-3 during the ocean winds project in February before they fully qualify me for that particular aircraft. That was also the weekend one of our fellow FD's got married. Yeah, I told him not to do it, but he did anyway ^_^ And he threw a great wedding and party.
Another FD also quit that week. He got a job as a forecaster at the NWS office in Shreveport, LA. And we're also down another flight director who had knee surgery not long ago. So we're down to 4 FD's and 3 aircraft soon to become 4 aircraft with the coming of another P-3. With so little qualified FD's and so many aircraft we're going to be doing a lot of training to get more qualified FD's ready for whatever may come.
Which is why I am SO busy at work these days. As the latest trainee FD I've been trying to document the training I've been doing over the last year to help make training future flight directors a lot easier. Currently the training of new FD's has been a put them in the hot seat and let them learn by trial and error approach. Which not only Sucks for all trainee's it isn't a very effective approach to training. So I'm changing it. I'm creating a workbook that will help guide new FD's in their training. It'll present situations that do occur during flights and post-processing Before they actually come up against them. So when they come across it in real time they know more about how to handle it. It's based on the OOD workbook we have to do when we are assigned to a new ship and also incorporates pass down notes that each new FD should know that previous FD's had to learn from experience.
I've posted some new pics from a formation flight we did at the end of September on my Flickr site here. I also posted some short clips of the P-3 flying during the formation flights on my YouTube site.
So check them out. There's some good pics of the P-3.
I'm also working on some movies I made during some of our GIV hurricane flights. I'll post those once I finish editing them and will give y'all the links.
