Poems, Prayers and Promises

Monday, again. I've said it before, and so now I'm just shamefully repeating myself, but I don't like Mondays. At least this semester, because I have 8 hours of back to back classes, including a lab and finished off with goods ol' 72 sim. Tonight in the sim we were shooting the NDB to runway 14 right into O' Hare, um, translation: we were flying an approach...um....lining up with the runway to land using just a little needle that points to numbers on a dial and tells you where the station is in relation to the airplane, and while we were flying this approach we reached our missed approach point, um, the time when you decide if you are going to land or not, and there was no runway or ground or anything. Not totally unusual because that does happen sometimes when you don't break out of the clouds, but according to the instructor we were supposed to see a runway this time. Every single person in the sim (three crewmembers and the instructor) just kind of gave each other bewildered looks. Finally I (since I was the pilot flying at the time) decided that I just must be that bad of a pilot to totally miss the runway in a no wind condition, so I gave the order to go around and shoved in go around thrust. The airplane rolled it's eyes and slowly began it's climb skyward. The instructor was still sitting in the back mumbling something about how the runway should have been there while playing with all of his buttons and stuff in the back. Finally he figured out that he had forgotten to turn on the visual displays and that was why there was no runway, or anything, out the window. Meanwhile were still flying the missed approach and then all of a sudden he resets the simulation and we go from being at 5000 feet and 250 knots to being smack on the end of a runway and at 0 knots. Strange thing happen in that simulator building. I almost expected to here the music from "The Twilight Zone" start playing as Rod Serling welcomed me to, the simulator zone. do DO do do do Do do do. But anyway. So then earlier in the day in turbines lab, we spent like half of the lab time trying to figure out why it smelled so bad around our engine work station. One dead bird and a definitely dead mouse later, we still hadn't found the main source of the smell. So instead of hanging around there we went over to hanger 1 and got to run a PT6 from the Beech Starship in a test cell. Lot of noise, lots of power. So that was fun. After that we braved the smell in the engines lab and started watching one of those Computer Based Training CDs about the Allison 250 that had your typical guy-with-the-really-boring-voice on it. But we brought a couch out of the library and stuck it in our work area so we had something comfortable to sit on while we watched the CD. Actually none of us were really watching the CD because we were all sitting around discussing things like women's place in the workplace (there's one girl in our group), marriage, and other such controversial topic. So just kind of picture this: four people, three guys and a girl, just kind of sitting on this couch in the middle of a huge hanger surrounded by engines, propellers, a variety of other aircraft parts, and dead animals, discussing all kinds of weird topics. It was interesting, and no I wasn't the one that brought up the topics I mentioned. Alright so I forgot whatever it was I was going to post about because I started playing with this "twilight zone" websight to find sound effects. I forgot how cool that show was! Also check out this link that has a power point presentation on the DHL jet that got shot with a shoulder launched rocket. http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/181-full.html

later