Someone else used his camera to take this picture of me. I am pretending to be sick to my stomach. Unfortunately, it became a running joke, and not a very funny one. I had gotten sick on that Hondo intro flight a few weeks before, and then I got sick on just about every flight during the FSP program.
The staff was incredible all the way around though. They switched instructors three times, trying a genial older guy, a tough younger guy, and a middle-of-the-spectrum kind of guy. I went to the flight surgeon repeatedly. He gave me all kinds of pills, one after another, to combat the airsickness. The final time I think he even gave me a placebo, telling me that I wasn't to let anyone know that he'd given me that particularly effective remedy that he wasn't really supposed to dispense. He'd run out of options and must have figured he'd try faking me out with a sugar pill, wondering if it wasn't all in my head instead of my stomach.
Despite all their efforts, only toward the very end did I fly and not get sick. When I finally began to "get it" did I become focused and not get sick. Unfortunately, I had not gotten to practice any landings because I was always sick by the time we returned to the field, and during most flights I never got the full lesson.
I realize now that it was probably my production of too much stomach acid over the years that contributed. Anything would upset my stomach.
One of my flight instructors on one of my early flights panicked when he realized that we didn't have any air sick bags on our first flight together. He halted the T-41 on the taxi way, got out, and ran ahead to get a couple of bags from the plane ahead. He returned triumphant and we took off. I realized later that what he intended to do was to go through every kind of maneuver he could think of to get me really sick and finally break me of the habit of getting airsick. It didn't work. Neither did any of the airsick pills until several flights into the program.
As I said, when I finally got really focused on flying the plane, I cured myself to a great degree. However, it was too late. The program was highly accelerated and compressed into three weeks. If you could not cut it during that shortened time, you did not make it.
My final evaluation flight, I did OK, except in one really bad segment: the stall. Had I not had an Air Force pilot with me, evaluating my flying, I would have died, crashed straight into the ground. I started the stall properly, but then I could not pull the plane out of the stall. I got stubborn rather than let the plane pull out on its own or with little assistance from me. It was much worse than the first time I got evaluated at the California DMV to get my driver's license and ran over curbs making a turn, stuff I had never done before, even during driver's training at school. The pressure got to me.
The evaluator finally took the controls from me, pulled us out of what would have been a fatal dive, and we quietly flew back to base. I knew I had absolutely no chance to be retained. I was going to be processed out of OTS in a couple of weeks and sent home. If you were selected to be a pilot and you were not prior service, that was the only option available to you out of OTS.
At the evaluation board, I admitted that I had done poorly. But I also added that I wanted to be in the Air Force. What position I held or what job I was given was not important. I think the board members were impressed. They recommended that I be given any other assignment; however, the Air Force was not going to be able to do anything about their recommendation.
One other side bar, I had another near-death experience flying at Hondo Field. My civilian instructor (they were all civilians until you reached the final evaluation flight) and I were returning to the field and had just turned into the landing pattern. I believe this day I had not gotten sick. I was at the controls. Suddenly, a beautiful hawk appeared in front of the windshield and flared its wings at us, its claws pointed toward us. The instructor instantly grabbed the controls and shoved the plane downward to avoid the hawk. I thought the encounter was remarkable, but he knew that if the bird hit the windshield, either or both of us could have been hit by the bird's body or by pieces of shattered Plexiglas and knocked unconscious or dazed enough to lose control and possibly crash.
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