Sim #7 -- Progress - painfully slowly, but surely...

5:50 AM - Saturday, Oct. 22, 2005
Sim #7 -- Progress - painfully slowly, but surely...

It’s a good thing that tonight was an improvement over last night, or I’m not sure I’d still be here. I have fantasized about loading Em into the car, pointing it northward on the freeway, and pretending this nightmare never happened. But no such luck – I need these measly paychecks. And I’m not leaving here until I get to check off my “I’m an Airline Pilot” box, damit!

Steve and I were better rested and slightly more on schedule tonight than we were last night. Not that we were chipper and smiling, but there definitely was less dread going on. We’d met with John at a coffee shop for a few hours before our night officially began so we could review the electrical system on this plane. It’s hard to believe that my brother Tom and I are related, as he’s been studying electrical engineering and I can barely tell you the difference between AC power and DC power. Nor do I care, really. If all indications are in the green and everything is going along just fine, I couldn’t care less that the CRJ-200 has 2 ni-cad batteries and 5 transformer rectifier units. I don’t give a rat’s ass that it requires 22 volts of power in the battery to be able to start the APU. But alas, I am learning to get this stuff into my head so it at least appears that I care when I’m sitting in front of the examiner.

But I digress. We flew better tonight than we did last night, which really isn’t saying much. Last night sucked so badly that we were both on the verge of tears off and on. Tonight I still had to beg myself not to cry, especially when John played “how can we teach stupid Erin to fly a missed approach procedure correctly?” It’s amazing to see the different styles in teaching that our two instructors have. One of them was masterful at managing our learning and our psyches and the other one is like a bull in the china shop that is our minds. Thank goodness we’re nearly done.

We still have a lot of work ahead of us tomorrow night, and Steve and I are both in agreement that we want one extra sim session. We’ve yet to convince our instructor, but if we fly tomorrow like we did today, I’m sure he will agree with us. The problem is that we just need more practice. Now that we mostly know how to do most of the procedures and maneuvers most of the time correctly, we just need repetition. Tomorrow night’s final sim session won’t throw too much new at us, but it will be enough that I don’t think either of us will feel comfortable moving ahead into the ride without more practice. If it keeps me from getting a Dreaded Pink Slip from the FAA, then I’m ready for The Stigma of An Extra Sim Session….

Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this all is that I keep having vivid dreams about my teeth falling out. Almost daily do I dream that my teeth are either rotting out, that they were knocked out, or that I just talk and in the process accidentally spit them out. My teeth hurt all the time when I’m awake, and especially when I emerge from the sim and when I first wake up each afternoon. I wake up feeling panicky and distraught that I’ve lost all my teeth (once again), and my teeth and gums hurt so much that I don’t wish to eat. And the less I eat, the less I feel like eating. And then I don’t have the energy to exercise, so my study schedule gets all out of whack. And then my brain powers down and I fly like a third grader, so then I get more stressed out and sleep less peacefully, inducing more dreams of rotting teeth. It’s weird….