Sorry for the lapse in training blogging...I've been busy. Now that this hurdle is over and the flying gets sort of fun again, I'm going to try to document the rest of my training...I've got some really fun flying coming up to share with you (mountain XC in the Rockies, gliders, tailwheel training, etc).
I finished my instrument rating training and flew up to KAND to meet the examiner for the practical test the other day...
I PASSED!!
It's hot, humid and HAZY here. When I got in teh plane to fly up to KAND to meet the DE, AWOS was reporting 3 mi. vis in haze.
I almost didn't go and thought about JFK Jr. on the way...kept my scan going on the way up there. No sense looking out the window when you can't see anything anyway. KAND was 4-7 vis in haze so I knew it was improving along my route.
I was late to the appt. with DE but he didn't seem to mind. We did the paperwork for about 1/2 hour, went through my logbook for a long time, went through the maintenance logs for awhile and then started on the oral.
He had my 8710 and written results through the computer IACRA thing...
Oral went great. I only missed a few things but was able to convince Randy that I knew enough to fly IFR successfully:
Weather: tstorms, icing
weather sources: how do you get a weather briefing? How do you get the information you need to plan a flight? Tell me about that info?Metars/tafs/atis/airmets/sigmets what are they, how long are they valid, etc.
airplane required inspections: what is required for IFR flight? How far off can alt. be? what happens if static port is clogged?
enroute charts: what is this (pointed to about 15-20 symbols, numbers)
approach charts: just discussion and questions about what we were looking at on the appch plates.
I did pretty well on the oral, some things he reminded me of:
flightwatch is great, you can learn a LOT in the course of a flight by just monitoring flightwatch. 122.0 is now on COM 2 whenever I go anywhere.
I missed the issuance freq. of tafs...every 6 hours, I said 12.
Oral done we went to fly. It was about 102° on the ramp.
preflight, taxi, as usual. Picked up flight following from greer approach to donaldson center for the ILS. Approach was BUSY.
Direct to IAF then vectors to join localizer. Brief the approach, ident the localizer. Everything looks good until I get this weird feeling I'm forgetting something. Hit the NAV/GPS button over the OBS: glideslope drops to 3 dots and the localizer is swinging through the center. CLOSE! I threw the plane into a left turn and reintercepted just in the nick of time. Flew a great ILS except that I forgot/ignored BOTH reporting points to approach (inside FAF, change to and contact tower). DE reminded me of call to tower and I turned red and contacted tower. Kept the needles to within 1 dot all the way to DH and went missed.
Forgot to raise the flaps. He pointed that out about 1/2 way back to KAND and didn't seem to fault me for it. Doh.
Nose high then nose low unusual attitudes. Fine. Oh yeah, remember that the unusual attitudes WILL precess your gyro instruments a lot. Don't forget to reset the DG to compass after the unusual attitudes.
Greer appch cleared me to ELW VOR but ooops, I had already turned on course. Another mistake.
At ELW I did the course reversal for the VOR 5 appch into AND. No problems. No moving map.
On the missed, I was cleared direct ELW and hold. Did 2 laps in the hold then he covered gyro instruments. No problem. Nailed the hold (his words). GPS 35 appch. No major screwup. He made the hold easy for me, we approached the hold from exactly the same direction as we'd entered it for the VOR 5 course reversal. I didn't have to think at all about the entry since I'd just done it minutes before.
Parked the plane and he said let's go inside and write up the certificate!
Had a discussion about his reccomendations on how to ease into IFR flying and got some great guidelines: take it slow. I had planned on that but the DE gave me great advice.
1. fly some trips where depart and dest are both VMC but some IMC enroute.
2. ease into departing with high IMC (3mi/1000'), IMC enroute (but with easy bailouts to VMC) and VMC destination.
3. gradually ease into approaches in IMC with 1000' ceilings then lowering them as I get more comfortable.
Sounds like a plan.
I filed IFR for the flight home and the .7 XC to GVL turned into 1.2 as I got vectored all over tarnation to get into the LOC 4 appch! Flew a perfect appch and broke off to circle-to-land on 22, canceled IFR in the air and I'm home.
Dodged the bucket of icewater from CFII.
YAY!
Anyone want to go see the inside of a cloud with me?