We have been back in East Tennessee for a week now, trying
to get caught up at home, work and on our sleep. Continuing where we left off,
we had our psychological evaluation on Monday, May 2. We got to the Docs office
around 10:30 in Boise, which was about a twenty-five minute drive from the MAF
campus. They had us take a test, the MMPI-2, which stands for Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It was kind of a goofy test, asking if we
wanted to be florists, if we were possessed by demons, or if we liked to tease
pets (I had to answer yes on at least one of those, can you guess which?). It
was 567 true or false questions and it took about an hour and a half to take.
Once we finished, we had a two hour break and drove around for 30
minutes trying to find a suitable place to eat. This baby that Tasha is growing
for us sure is picky. We finally found a pizza joint and took our time eating.
Once we got back to the office, Dr. Bennet took me back first. He asked mainly about how we met, how long
we had dated, how long we have been together, how I proposed, and other stuff like that.
We really didn't get into the results of the test too much, but he did pick up
on my personality really quickly. He diagnosed me as a “nose to the grindstone, gotta
work quick, gotta work hard, gotta work now” kinda guy. He also knew how my
work ethic coupled with my ADD past could cause problems and just cautioned me
to pay attention to what my family was going through with the whole process of
all the training, fundraising and travel overseas.
(Editors note: Boy was he not kidding…. Click here to read about a perfect example of this….)
He then took Tasha back and talked with her for about 35 minutes asking about her past, how she felt about the whole idea of serving the Lord through MAF overseas, etc. The experience was actually much better and nurturing than we were expecting. We had heard some stories from some of the other families that made us a little leery, but we cannot complain.
(Editors note: Boy was he not kidding…. Click here to read about a perfect example of this….)
He then took Tasha back and talked with her for about 35 minutes asking about her past, how she felt about the whole idea of serving the Lord through MAF overseas, etc. The experience was actually much better and nurturing than we were expecting. We had heard some stories from some of the other families that made us a little leery, but we cannot complain.
Tuesday began the flight portion.
Tasha was still nauseous most of the time, and because of a cold, was still
coughing and feeling downright icky. The flight instructor and I did the
pre-flight on the airplane, hopped in, and took off. We flew west about 20 miles, well clear of
the city and Boise airspace. We did turns, steep turns, slow flight, stalls,
turning stalls, followed by some other maneuvers that I had never practiced before.
They asked me to slow the airplane down to 80 knots with the wing flaps up.
Then, I was to drop in full flaps, keep the airspeed at 80 knots, maintain
altitude and heading, and then bring the flaps back up, while keeping everything
else the same.This was an exercise to help understand the correlation between
drag, lift and power (I think....). Then we went to an airport north west of
Nampa to do some touch and goes.
The first landing was not as good
as I expected. Not to mention my landing pattern, a rectangular shape flown
around the runway, was very much askew because I am used to flying much faster
aircraft and was used to making turns much sooner than required of the Cessna
206. In the Beechcraft Baron, we normally fly the pattern anywhere from 120 to
150 knots, in the 206 however, we were doing it at 55 to 70 knots. Because of
the extra airspeed, the Baron has a much more "positive" feel with less input
into the controls. The 206 just as a different feel and it took me a while to
get used to it. By the end of the first day though, my landings became
smoother, I got used to the height of and attitude of the airplane on the
ground. I wasn’t feeling too confident though. I thought my maneuvers were
sloppy. They gave me some tolerances, + or - 10 knots on the airspeed, + or -
100 feet on the altitude and + or - 10 degrees on the heading. I was within
those, but I felt I could have done much better. I also know the caliber of
Pilots MAF looks for and didn’t feel like I met their expectations. I was done
by 1 or 2 just about every day of the flight week, which gave me more time to
go study and spend time with Tasha.
The second day was more instruction
than evaluation. My instructor introduced some mountain flying concepts to me,
how to determine if we could safely fly up a narrow valley/canyon, and how to
cross a ridge line safely with only 100 feet between the landing gear and the
top of the ridge. First we practiced the maneuvers at 5500 feet, away from any
terrain. The procedure was to slow the airplane to 80 knots, and 20 degrees of
flaps, and complete the landing checklist.
MAF is all about the use of
checklists. This is a GREAT thing, and one of the things that most pilots (myself
included) get complacent on. MAF understands it can be a pain, so they make it
easy. The printed the checklist on one sheet of paper, so no more searching to
find the right page, and also permanently fixed it to the yoke, so its right in
front of you. For landing and takeoff, they also made a series of switches,
each with a certain task required to be completed before the switch was
flipped. When all 5 or 6 switches are flipped, a green light turns on
indicating the airplane is configured for either takeoff or landing. Anyway,
back to terrain flying.
When the airplane is setup in the
80 knots and 20 degrees of flaps, a 45 degree bank turn is entered, add a
little bit of power and back pressure on the yoke, and the turn radius (or
horizontal distance covered on the ground) is radically reduced without loosing
any airspeed or altitude, which provides a safe way out in case a canyon turns
into a dead end. It sounds easy at altitude and away from terrain, and it is
because you can see the horizon quite well and you can understand the relation
of the airplane to the horizon. But then we descended down to 3500 feet, and
pointed the nose straight at a mountain. We set the airplane up in the terrain
configuration and waited.....and waited.... and waited... the mountain kept
getting bigger....... and bigger.... and closer......and bigger…… To be
continued…
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