Week 0 - january 3 to 10

First of all, let me introduce you class 11A : 11 pilots, 12 engineers, including one from Canada and one from France, and one WSO (weapon and system operator). We will spend 48 weeks here at Edwards Air Force Base, California, studying hard, flying a lot, to become Flight Test Engineer and Experimental Test Pilots.
This first week at TPS is not really part of the curriculum (which is why it is called "Week 0").
We had to go through a good number of briefs : safety briefs, welcome brief, buddy care brief, equal opportunity brief, ...some were interesting, other were funny, and some... mandatory.
A few pics from the survival training

Survival briefs were the most fun. We got to learn how to pick edible fish species from the sea. I just wonder what kind of fishes survives the desert climate we have here ? (true enough, the lakebeds are, so far, just lakes, and rather big ones). But we may deal with this kind of environnement when we go to our filed trips in a few months.

The week ended with a few social events :  Thirsty Thrusday, at Jeremy and Renee's was a good chance to improve our G tolerance...hem, no, I meant our alcool tolerance !
First friday got eveyone together : class 10B, our senior class,some of the instructors, Colonel Zamot (TPS' commander) and his wife, and of course 11A, complete with spouses and kids ! The night was starting well !!!
Later in the evening, we let our spouses take care of the child and went to colonel Zamot's house for our first roof stomp ! We were warmly invited to come in and JT soon found the fridge !

We all had a geat time.

Saturday morning was the road rally, organized by the 10B class. After 2hours racing across the base to find all the ceckpoint, we found out that we were decent navigators, with a good help from the GPS to be honest. We then shared a lunch made for us by 10B spouses. Thank you, that was delicious !!!

After all these events, sunday was dedicated to family time, before going back to business.

Coming on next week : more briefs, C12, F16 and T38 ground shool, egress training, ....