There was always an ever present anxiety for candidates in flight school that you might "Wash Out' or get "Recycled" during training. Washing out is a pretty accurate description of managing to fail in training so severely that you are removed from the course all together. If all the schools I attended in the military, the flight school attrition rate was the highest I encountered. I was in flight school twice as long as the average candidate (as noted in previous posts) due to a medical hold and I saw a lot of people depart the program without graduating. Some couldn't take the pressure and resigned (One of these was apparently a natural pilot who couldn't deal with fear of flying.) others trying to stick it out and failed due to inability to meet the training criteria. (I almost made that list too.)
Getting recycled, like it implies means you restart part of the training. This can be due to several factors like failing a checkride, getting injured or like me a medical hold keeping grounded so you cannot fly. Some of these can be avoided, some things you can gut it out and others like medical hold have to be endured. One of the badges of distinction in getting recycled is the accumulation of colored flight (platoon) baseball caps as you move from one flight to another flight behind you in training to retake that section of training. I think the record while I was there was a candidate who was a member of 5 different flights and still graduated.
I was supposed to be in Light Blue flight (class 87-09 I believe) and ended up in Royal Blue flight class 88-02 after cooling my heels on medical hold and assigned a make work job in the training company supply room when I wasn't temporary duty (TDY) to Fort Gordon, GA for tests, surgery, and more tests. During this stay on hold, I started my interest in personal computing which eventually resulted in my post army career.
I digress, as the idea of this post is about some of the things we did to avoid getting recycled. The easiest way to flunk a Department of the Army (DA) school is to fail the physical training (PT) test. I will be the first to admit that I have never been an athlete. But at times I have been fairly athletic when I had sufficient motivation to be so. I did more physical training prior to flight school than I had for any other even in my life. Once I was in the Warrant Officer Entry Course (WOEC) I felt a lot of pressure to lose weight and to get in better physical condition. Part of that I did inadvertently getting tasked as the Administrative Officer for my training flight which required me to go to the headquarters building 8 times a day, and that resulted in my doing 64 pull ups a day minimum (4 4-count pull-ups going in, and 4 more going out. You had to do pull-ups any time you based the pull-up bars conveniently located just outside the building.). I dropped from 215 lbs and from being close to my MAX weight to a svelte 184 lbs. (I was 6 foot 3 inches at the time.) Likely the best shape of my life. The other thing I did to help my conditioning was run road guard during PT.
Running in formation is boring, If you are above the average height, it can also be painful as it limits your stride. There are two ways you can run PT and not be in the block formation during the run. You can call the cadence that the formation is singing or you can run road guard and stop traffic at intersections during the run. I have done both, but in this training environment, since I was focusing on conditioning, road guard better suited my plan. There were 6 road guards in the PT formation giving me better odds for one of those opportunities.
I preferred the front road guard position, and we quickly established who would run each position. As we got in better condition, we changed things up out of boredom by doing something extra before we took our position to stop traffic. We would go off to the grass and knock out a quick 10 pushups then get up and move into the intersection and stop traffic. This worked out well until I stepped into a concealed hole an sprained my ankle.
Any injury that resulted in a "Profile" (an exemption from XXX task). Your profile could last no more than 72 hours without major consequences. If you were on profile for a longer period, you had to say goodbye to you teammates, because you were getting recycled and you got to start making all new friends in a group that has already gelled into a fairly cohesive group. If that sounds like being an outsider, you get the correct impression. I got lucky in that my injury occurred on a Friday morning. My ankle sprain was severe enough that I was placed on "Quarters" and had to return for a re-eval of the injury in 72-hours. Quarters is the army equivalent to getting sent to your room. No training and the only time I could leave the barracks was to go to the dining facility. I got lucky at lunch as one of my classmates brought me a sandwich so I could stay in my bunk and keep the ice on my ankle. Dinner that night and the weekend meals ensured that I got practice with my crutches as walking on that ankle wasn't an option and the dining facility was 500 yards away from the barracks.
Monday was my day of reckoning, I had to get off profile and be returned to training. So that morning, I strained to get that foot into my Corcoran Jump Boot, and laced that thing as tight as humanly possible, then I proceeded to use those crutches until the last moment, when I went in to see the Flight Surgeon for re-eval. He was impressed as I strolled in and hopped up on the exam table and took the boot and sock off. The ankle was all sorts of black, blue and purple and he moved it all around and asked me how it felt. I said it was a bit tender but generally it looked much worse than it felt and I was returned to normal duty. The pain was horrid, but I wasn't going to admit that and dealt with it and nursed it through the rest of the week. The following Monday I was back at PT road guard, and paid better attention to where I stepped.
About 8 months later, a buddy (Mark) and I were nearing graduation and we played 1 on 1 basketball as PT due to flying on Night 1 (Sundown to Midnight) or Night 2 (Midnight to Dawn) schedules and that meant getting PT on your own. We played a fairly physical game of basketball with Mark on the perimeter playing guard and I played the post based on our speed and builds. Mark was always faster than I was and that lead to me reacting slow to a fake he made moving to my left. As he came around on my right I hit him in the forehead with my elbow and laid him out flat. We didn't think much of it until he stood up and noticed a 10 centimeter vertical gash in his right eyebrow. I grabbed a rag and he put on his eyebrow to stop the bleeding. We jumped into my car and off to the emergency room (ER) at the base hospital we went.
When we arrived at the ER, the doctor evaluated him and as we feared, he needed stitches. Since we were actively flying, Mark's concern was getting grounded. The 72-hour rule applied as anytime you are given an anesthetic, you are grounded for a 7-days. Faced with the option of getting recycled, he opted for stitches, without anesthesia. The doctor was a bit taken aback, but he understood we were Warrant Officer Candidates (WOCs) and I'm sure he'd seen similar stunts. Mark was sewn up without further incident (he didn't make a sound during the procedure.) and he related that he'd experienced worse things, but he couldn't think of one offhand. Our flight training continued without further incident. Mark and I both graduated in the same flights that we were initially assigned to when we started out flight training and avoided the scourge of being recycled (Just barely).
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