Let the revolution begin! Today I got an early Christmas/Chanukah present: A Nintendo Wii. What an amazing machine. It is the latest console to come from Nintendo and ushers in a new era of home video gaming. The controller uses a combination of buttons and motion to control what goes on in the game. If you're playing a tennis game, you actually swing the controller like you would a racket and your on-screen character responds by swinging the racket in the game. Way cool. The amount of movement required to play these games really makes them exciting and fun for others to watch. Already I've had many friends over who want to play and we've had some intense 2 vs. 2 tennis matches going. People also seem to want to "come over" and "hang out" more often. My brother Nate has reported that he even picked up two girls and invited them over to his dorm room because they wanted to play the Wii. Of course, those are unconfirmed reports....

------

This year I spent Thanksgiving in Atlanta with Greg and his family as well as my future in-laws. We had Thanksgiving dinner at Holly's new place and shared a wonderful meal, watched some football and played Scrabble and Monopoly. It was a lot of fun. I wish I could have spent more than a long weekend there, but sadly I had to come back south to continue flight training. I'm planning on flying myself into Atlanta someday towards the end of my Primary training in Pensacola. Sure will be a lot faster than driving!

Today was my first introduction to aerobatic flight. What a rush! The T-34 isn't the best aircraft for aerobatics, but you can do some pretty neat stuff in it. Our g-limits during the maneuvers are +4.5 and -2.3 g's. The instructor demoed each of the maneuvers and then I performed them myself. I was nowhere near as good as I thought I would be (doing a good loop is much more complicated than just pulling back on the stick for a while). We did an aileron roll, a loop, a barrel roll, a wing-over, an immelmann, a split-S and a one-half cuban eight. Each presented their own challenges and it will take a lot of practice before I'm proficient at them. I want to get as good as I can at them now, because if I go Jets, then I'll be doing a lot more of them!



Some examples of aerobatic maneuvers:

Loop ------------------------ Immelmann
------

Split-S -------------------------- Cuban Eight
------

Barrel Roll

After my safe-for-solo check-ride on Friday, I was authorized for a flight by myself. No instructor. The flight was totally awesome! I took off from NAS Whiting Field and flew to one of the Navy Outlying Fields (OLFs) and did 5 touch-and-go landings. Not having anyone in the back seat telling you what to do and where to go was a little different. I was completely responsible for the aircraft from take-off to landing back at home base. After my touch-and-go's, I toured around the working area between Pensacola and Mobile. Because this was my first solo, I wasn't authorized to do any "cool" maneuvers. Just fly around and don't crash. That's all that was important. I was really pumped when I landed back at Whiting. I had now flown an entire hop by myself.