quote:
But why would someone who chooses not to do cross country hops take longer to finish! You lost me.
Dave, basically it is like Matt said. You have the option to take the plane on the road, and knock out your flights in one cross country. For me, I completed 8 syllabus flights through the course of my Intermediate training on that cross country. And visited various military and civilian airfields, in addition to talking to different Centers and Approach outside of the Whiting Field local area.
But for the people who for some reason or another don't put in a cross country request, they sit at home and are put on the schedule during the regular week for out and ins, or round robins as Matt said. So then you are subject to weather, aircraft/instructor availability, standing duty, etc. So what took me one weekend to finish 8 events, may take another SNA two weeks. Case in point, I came back from my cross country, and I only had 4 Visual Navigation flights left to complete Intermediate, and it took me a week and a half to knock that out on two seperate out and ins! So in effect, if I recall correctly, there were only 12 Intermediate flights for us, plus the groundschool.
Basically, Intermediate training for people going into either Props or Helos consists of more indepth IFR knowledge of RI and AirNav procedures. Also it is the first time you can take advantage of a "copilot" and offload some of the cockpit duties. Primary is preparing everyone to be jet pilots, to see who can handle the load and stay ahead of the plane. In Intermediate for Props and Helo tracks, the emphasis switches to taking advantage of the resources available, and offloading some of the flight duties. The instructor acts as a somewhat "stupid and non proactive copilot", its up to you to assign tasks such as taking over the coms, dialing up nav aids, briefing him to back you up on altitude and heading, depending on the approach to call out checkpoints, etc.
As for Advanced, yes VT31 (the squadron I am in) has the T44, while VT35 has the TC12. The majority of the syllabus after the initial 13 FAM flights and a couple of Night FAMs is Radio Intrument procedures training. Then we get into two FORM flights and some Over water Navigation flights. There is a portion of the training where we do low level photo recon practice, or "rigging ships", that I am definitely looking forward to.