Selection was finally over and I knew what I was going to fly for the rest of my Army career. I felt a sense of relief since I no longer had to stress about possibly flying an aircraft that I didn't prefer (although flying anything at all is amazing!) As I said in a previous post, I took some time off to relax for about a week. After that, I got right back in to studying before my class actually started.
There's a lot to learn when you get to your advanced airframe. If you have a lot of time between selection and starting class, use it wisely! I spent my time learning 5's and 9's (limitations and emergency procedures), and learning the startup procedure for the helicopter (since it's about 10x longer than the TH-67!) Learning 5's and 9's and startup before you even go to class is slightly difficult, because just like when you did it in Primary, you don't know what a lot of the acronyms mean or even where most of the switches are in the helicopter. I spent a lot of time at the technical library and got help from a few of my friends that started the class a couple weeks ahead of me.The first couple of weeks of the UH-60 course are spent in academics. You learn mostly about systems of the helicopter and malfunction analysis (this is where emergency procedures come in to play). This part of the the course is called prep phase. On the first day, after an introduction brief, you will receive your first 5 and 9 test. It will have most of the limitations (at least all of the quantifiable ones), and ALL of the underlined emergency procedures on it. You have to get at least 50% to pass the first one. As I said before, study and learn your 5's and 9's before you even start class, it will make your life a whole lot easier. We had 2 guys that were held back a class because they didn't bother to look at 5's and 9's before we started. They tried to play catch-up but trying to study for academics and the start up at the same time was too much and they got set back.
There are a few tests during academics as well. After the first couple of weeks of academics, you'll spend a week at the CPT (Cockpit Procedural Trainer) learning the start up procedure and the learning about performance planning. In hindsight, I'm glad that I took the time to try and learn the startup procedure before starting class, because it made that part of class a little bit easier. There were a few guys that never looked at it, and they were definitely feeling the pressure of trying to catch up.
In addition to just learning the start up procedure, you also must memorize every single Warning, Caution, and Note associated with the startup procedure.....there are 43 of them. You can write W,C, or N in your checklist to help you remember where they go, and how many are associated with a step, but you cannot write any other notes in your checklist to help you remember.So....only a couple of weeks in to the 60 course and we had already jammed our brains full of new information. Even though we had learned all this new information, the hard part is continuing to remember it as you receive even more new information, and especially remembering all the stuff that you learned at the beginning of flight school, like Aeromedical, Airspace, Aerodynamics, etc. A lot of times they'll refer to your brain as an iceberg and the information as penguins. The iceberg can only contain so many penguins. Once you start putting more penguins on the iceberg, others will start to fall off!
Even though we had so much to learn and continue to learn in a short period of time, I was much more committed to learning it for the 60 course than I was during primary (at least in regards to the aircraft specific things). In primary, we were required to learn the 5s and 9s for the TH-67, and although I learned them, I didn't spend a ton of time really committing them to long term memory, because I knew I'd only need to know it for a few short weeks. When I started learning Blackhawk stuff I wanted to make sure I committed it to memory since I needed to know it for the rest of my career.
That was prep phase for the 60 course. A ton of information in a short period of time, all to prepare us to fly the best helicopters that the US Army has to offer.