Category: IFR Training

It has been a bit since I last posted.  I am not ignoring the blog but there has been a slight delay in my training.  Honestly, I haven’t been flying lately.  A few things have compiled to block my progress, weather, studies …… my kids neurotic afternoon schedule.  Most notably, I am nearing the end of my ground school class and I am spending a lot of my limited time, and brain power, on getting ready for the the written exam.

My lesson this week was cancelled due to the impending snow that seems to be hitting the east coast on a fairly regular basis lately.  My next lesson is scheduled in a couple of weeks due to spring break and my written test hurdling toward me at an uncomfortable speed.  Honestly, I think I’m ready but who really knows with the way the FAA writes questions.  I consistently score in the mid 90’s on practice tests but there always seem to be a question or two that is either worded funny or I have no idea what they are talking about.  The latter scares me the most.

The last bit of info is that my current instructor is moving on to higher ground.  Well, not necessarily ground but she has taken a job with a regional airline!  Really exciting news as she is very passionate about aviation.  I really enjoyed working with her in getting started with my IFR training.  Admittedly, I was completely bummed when I first heard.  After thinking about how much she will be gaining with her career, I became genuinely excited for her.  I certainly hope to hear about her training and aviation adventures in the future.  I can officially say, I know and trained with an airline pilot!

Fear not readers, I will be interviewing/trying out with a new instructor shortly.  Instead of jumping right in with a fresh approach, I want to knock this written out.  Can you tell, that the written exam is front and center on my mind?  Not sure if I have made that obvious enough, lol.

I may post in between but it will likely be 2 weeks before I have my next (First Lesson) with a new instructor.

It has been a while since i’ve had an IFR lesson.  Weather and ground school studies has been keeping me away.  I am hopeful that my flight next week pans out.  We are coming to the end of my ground school class and as I prep for the test I am limiting my flight attempts to once a week right now.

That hasn’t stopped me from flying.  Last weekend I went up for a maneuvers and currency flight with my son.  Believe it or not, but during my IFR training so far, I haven’t been able to keep decently current with my VFR passenger requirements.

In order to be VFR current for passengers you must have 3 take offs and landings in the last 90 days.  The way my lessons were working out, with one landing per lesson, my currency was just slowly creeping ahead a few weeks at a time.

Look the real reason wasn’t currency at all.  To be honest, my club has a cookout on the second Saturday of every month and the burgers are awesome!  If you’re ever in the Sanford area on a second Saturday.  Come check it out.  We have an awesome club.  … And Burgers …. And hotdogs/brats … oh and also members! 😀

http://wingsofcarolina.org/events

Scroll down to “2nd Saturday Monthly Cookout“

I promise that you won’t regret it!

So today I was scheduled for another IFR lesson and the weather presented us with a test of Aeronautical Decision Making (ADM).

This morning I woke to this TAF:

KRDU 081138Z 0812/0912 27006KT P6SM SCT050
FM081400 27011G19KT P6SM BKN050 OVC060
TEMPO 0818/0822 6SM -SHRA FEW040 BKN050 OVC070
FM090300 30006KT P6SM SKC

For the un-initiated, the key factor here is “FM081400 27011G19KT”.  This means wind will be 11 knots gusting to 19 knots from 270 degrees.  My home aerodrome has runways at 03/21 so we would obviously be taking off of 21 with a right crosswind.

This presents us with a 9.5 knot crosswind and 5.5 knot headwind.  No big deal for the SkyHawk that has a 15 knot demonstrated crosswind.  Now let’s look at the gust factor.  If we take a gust right above the runway we are looking at a 16.5 knot crosswind with a 9.5 knot headwind.  This would put us at 1.5 knots above the demonstrated crosswind of the airplane.  “GO AROUND!!!!! QUICK!!!”

I know what you’re saying, there are plenty of old and bold pilots that land in crosswind components higher than this with no sweat.  You yourself may have landed a plane in a crosswind higher than demonstrated and didn’t even know.  This could be due to an unexpected gust, at the last minute on a fairly calm day, that made things a little hairy but all things worked out.

This brings us back to ADM and how important it is to have a good solid grasp on the possible outcomes of a flight.  This is a lot harder as a low hour pilot because you don’t know what you don’t know.  It takes time and experience to learn how to handle many different weather conditions and what your personal limits can handle.

I come back to a saying that I first heard from our Chief Flight Instructor when I first started flying.  A pilot starts his aviation journey with two bags.  A full bag of luck and an empty bag of experience. When things start to go sideways in an airplane, pilots can pull answers from these two bags.  Eventually luck will run out… we just hope that when it does, we have enough experience to handle the situation.

As the saying goes, “Aviation is one of the few endeavors in which you are given the test before the lesson.” (Also credited to our Chief Flight Instructor)

I talk with as many experienced pilots as I can in order learn from the many years of experience that have come before me.  I have a solid understanding that I am a low hour pilot and my experience bag has very little to pull from.  That is why even though today was marginal, it is also a lesson in ADM.  If I were on my own with no flight instructor, this would have been a definite no go for me.  I have a personal crosswind limit of 10 knots right now.  The primary reason that I am training for my IFR rating, is to become a safer pilot.  A large part of being a safer pilot is having good ADM.

In closing, with the winding gusting to just above the demonstrated crosswind component I could possibly be a test pilot.  This information coupled with similar wind conditions over the past few days, suggesting that gusts can be much higher at times than forecast.  I decided I don’t want to be a test pilot today!

So today, I am trying to decide:  Which one?

Bose A20, Many $$$$$

LightSpeed Zulu 3, Reasonably priced

As the title suggests, it was a beautiful day for flying.  After many simulator sessions, we were finally able to spread our wings and enjoy the great weather.  Of course, my instructor enjoyed the view and I got to inspect the instruments for most of the flight.  (The instrument glass is really clean, lol)

Even though I was under the hood, I was able to enjoy the cold smooth air.  It was a great opportunity to compare and contrast the simulator training vs the real thing.  The one thing I noticed right away is that once trimmed out, the real thing flies like a proper airplane.  No neurotic altitude and heading changes.  You can really appreciate how much a trimmed airplane can help lighten the workload.

During preflight, I had discovered that we had some light frost on the aircraft.  I wasn’t expecting this since the temp/dewpoint spread for the last 24 hours was decently large.  Of course the lesson here is that weather can be very local and differences are a thing.  No worries, rotate the airplane in the sun in order to remove the little bit of frost accumulated.  Some sun tan lotion and a pair of sunglasses and the skyhawk would be right at home at the beach. 😀

Start and runup went pretty well. Other than me being a bit slow on how to cold weather start.  It is simple so not sure what is going through my mind on how to handle the mixture as the airplane starts.  Maybe it is just nerves.

Runup went well so we taxied to the runway to depart into the wild blue yonder.  After a few runway checks, we were off!

At 700 feet I get the order to don my fashionable foggles. (They’re all the rage this season)  I comply and once back at the yoke I setup to track the liberty VOR.  It was now that I had the first,  “Hey something isn’t right here!” moment.  The VOR was centered vertical and horizontal.  I know that I am not that good coming off the runway so something is up.  I check that NAV 1 is tuned properly so what gives?  We are high enough that we should be receiving.  At this point, my instructor chimed in about the CDI being set to GPS and that if I want to use to track the VOR, I should use VLOC.  Doh!!!

Ok, so we are tracking right along and I get the airplane trimmed out.  Pretty well if I do say so myself.  Once we reach altitude, I trim up for a slow cruise.  Why? Not really sure other than the slow cruise configuration was at the top of my noggin.

My instructor asked me to perform a couple of heading changes and then we broke out the A Pattern.  The pattern went pretty well, no real surprises here.  Again, it was good to compare and contrast from the sim and I have to say, the real thing is easier. I say that now but I can almost visualize the serenity of this pattern then fast forwarding a few lessons where I am overloaded to the point I can’t remember my own name while trying to fly, navigate, talk, etc.  I can look back on this lesson like “Still easy?”

After Pattern A was complete, we performed a stall series, first an approach stall and then a departure stall…. and then a departure stall.  For the first departure stall, at current cruise speed I just pushed the throttle in and pulled back.  I felt a little weird about the process, like something wasn’t right.  However, the cold air made us climb like crazy and I could hear “Dangerzone” from Top Gun in the distance, so climb on!

After the recovery I get the question of, “Have you been taught how to do this for ACS?”  Oh… yeah… I remember now.  I need to slow to climb speed, then throttle on and climb.  Ooops!  It was an impressive climb in the cold air though. Haha!

So, for the second departure stall I killed the Top Gun music and slowed to 65 and then began a proper departure stall.

For the final bit of our flight, my instructor had me fly with my eyes closed.  Left turns, level out, right turns, left, level, left, right ……  I kind of enjoy those types of things.  It was pretty cool when she told me to open my eyes when I thought that we were level but, in actuality, we were in a slow left turn.  She also indicated that as soon as I closed my eyes, I immediately turned us to the slow left turn.  Crazy how your body interprets the feelings versus reality.  It is a good exercise to show you that you should trust the instruments.

“I have the airplane”, my instructor has me close my eyes as she banks and climbs/descends so I can setup for some unusual attitude recoveries.  I could tell she was enjoying this part. Overall, I think they went pretty well, nothing too exciting.

After a few vectors and altitude clearances like I was communicating with ATC.  I was told to remove the hood and we were set up on 45 degree into the pattern.  After doing the landing thing, I buttoned up the airplane and we debriefed.

I think the takeaways that I got from this lesson are a few:

• Properly trimmed airplane is awesome for these maneuvers (Smooth air doesn’t hurt either)
• I need to write down my altitude instructions ( I couldn’t seem to retain that information)
• Knowing your pitch/power settings makes life a lot easier

The last one I felt was huge today.  This is where I think the extra sim time in the beginning is paying off.  In the sim, you can cheaply learn how to use these settings.  They seem to work better in the real aircraft than I could have imagined.

Also, I think that once you figure out that your pitch power settings are just a starting point, it helps you as well.  Example, I started out with 2100 rpm and +1 pitch angle for ~ 95 kt slow cruise.  Today, I quickly figured out that it was really 2000 rpm and right around +2 degree pitch angle.  It was pretty easy to get things stable since I committed standard numbers to memory.

Lots of fun today and looking forward to the next lesson!

If you want to see the crazy track today, –> Clicky Clicky!

So today, much like the previous couple of lessons, the weather just isn’t cooperating for a real flight.  So back to the sim we go to work on fundamentals with more twists, turns, spirals, etc…

I have to be honest, even though the sim is twitchy and I am not aloft in the wild blue yonder, I do kind of enjoy the exercises.  Today we started the same way as last lesson with a low vis takeoff and then tracking the LIB VOR.

We performed an exercise to validate the turn coordinator.  We calculated bank angle based on the speed of the aircraft.

(True AirSpeed/ 10) * 1.5  will give you the bank angle for a standard rate turn.

In order to prove this point, we tried 120 kts and 80 kts in order to see that the turn coordinator always read correctly even though our bank angles were different for the different speeds.  Neeto!

Next We jumped right into the Pattern A to get warmed up.  I thought all was well but somewhere in the haze of everything, I completely missed a 45 degree right turn, so my final track was a bit askew.  Outwardly, I kind of shrugged it off but inwardly, I had my first signs of doubt. If I would have missed this in the air, for realsy, I would be lost.  Why did I not pick up on that sooner?  I guess this is all part of the learning process.

We next moved on to a new pattern, Pattern C.  My instructor gave me this pattern at the end of the previous lesson and I meant to try it on my sim at home first.  The best that I got, was looking over it yesterday a bit.  I knew that this was going to be an interesting pattern. You be the judge (Below).

Pattern C

Two of 270 degree and two 450 degree turns with mixed climbs and descents, I made the comment that there was no way this was going to go well.  My reservations aside, I jumped into the flying and took it one step at a time. (PSA: I am using the term “Flying” here pretty loosely since I am in a room… in a converted car seat in front of a computer. But hey… it works.)

I won’t bore you with the details but overall I think I did fairly well.  The big takeaway from this exercise is that by memorizing your pitch/power settings and if you can stay at least one step ahead of the airplane, you will be ok.  For me, it helps to constantly brief.  After a turn, brief the next leg, then brief the next turn… just keep talking.  I am pretty sure that is what my instructor is looking for but it really does help me.

After the C pattern, we worked on a few partial panel exercises, vacuum failures and then pitot static failure.  My instructor would pose as ATC calling out headings and throwing in a climb and descent at certain locations.  Pitot static failure is where really knowing your pitch/power settings help you tremendously.  Since you don’t have an airspeed indicator, knowing that a certain RPM and pitch attitude gives you a resultant airspeed.  You can also climb and descend at a given airspeed by the same chart.  It was actually really cool…. like magic!

Lastly, we performed some compass based maneuvers.  Working on UNOS, (Undershoot North, Overshoot South).  We worked on 180’s and 360’s to see how this effect worked.  Honestly, the simulator didn’t do a very good job of the lag or the lead on the turns.  We will work on this again in the real aircraft.

Overall it was a pretty good session.  Still looking for the elusive real aircraft lesson.  I am hoping that the foundation that I have been building in the sim, translates to the real world.  We shall see! And you will hear about it!

The Setup

Today was an IFR type of day.  However, I am not quite ready to be unleashed into the fluffy stuff.  So we decided that some basic maneuvers in the sim would be a good course of action. The 5 T’s, Time, Turn, Twist, Throttle, Talk or slowly burning into my mind.

My instructor informed me that we would be working on basic maneuvers including climbs, descents, turns and some VOR tracking.  Basically putting to use the pitch power graph that I built in our previous lesson.  I spent a bit of time trying to memorize the pitch power graph and I do believe it helped with my workload in this lesson.

In order to put it all together, we would be performing some basic patterns that are meant to simulate the type of maneuvering that one would do for a departure, approach, etc.

Example of one of the patterns:

Pattern A

It doesn’t look like much but if you get behind the airplane it could get really messy.  At the moment, I have the ability to have my instructor freeze the sim if I need to decompress or to think through what is next.  When you’re in the soup, that is not an option.

I think that I did fairly well thinking through and verbalizing my way through the patterns.  I honestly thought they were a lot of fun but then again, I am on the ground sitting in a building.  It will be a lot different when it really counts.  One of the issues that I exhibited in the beginning was that when I would go to change the heading bug “Twist”, I would slightly bring the yoke with me as I reached to the right.  This would steepen the turn and cause the standard rate turn calculation to be off.  I was able to manage that a little better as the lesson progressed.

The Lesson

So, first off, my instructor had me take off from an extremely low visible situation.  The idea was to fly the directional gyro and hit the numbers just like a normal takeoff except I can’t actually see where I am going.  In real life, I would never do this but it is technically a legal for part 91 operations.  It is the case of just because it is legal, doesn’t mean that it is smart.

I was instructed to takeoff and track to the LIB VOR.  So shortly after takeoff my first goof came into play.  I setup the VOR frequency and as I lifted off, I was waiting for it to come alive. Waiting… waiting… waiting.  Then I had a feeling that I am sure will become super familiar in the near future.  That feeling of something doesn’t seem right here and I am not sure what is going on.  It turns out that I entered the frequency into the Nav2 so the VOR2 was actually tracking but I was looking at VOR1 which is really controlled by the GPS Radio.  My instructor saw that I was confused and politely paused the sim so we could discuss.  Again, not something you can do when you’re in the soup and ATC is barking at you.

Once that was all sorted, I tracked to the VOR with some climbs, descents and speed changes.  This was the warm up for the pattern work.  (See the “Pattern A” above).

I actually felt pretty good performing the two patterns that we worked on today.  Pattern A was more about timing and turns.  Pattern B added speed changes and a step down descent at the end.  The final maneuver was a missed approach in which I learned a new memory aid,  Cram, Climb, Clean, Cool, Call  (Neato!).  At that point the lesson was over, we didn’t actually execute any missed to a hold.  At this point we had been going for nearly 2 hours.  I think my brain was probably as full as it would get.

You can really see how things are starting to come together.  At each turn I would go through the 5 T’s, (Time, Turn, Twist, Throttle, Talk).  I think I have that burned into my brain now. lol

Here are the results:

Pattern A

Pattern B

(Below is the plotted patterns on the sim.)

Actual Pattern

You can see that they sort of look like the pattern that I was shooting for.  Of course they also look like they could be a virus as well.

Overall, I am enjoying the training so far and looking forward to the next lesson.  I look forward to performing these patterns in a real skyhawk.  I will try to remember to record my flight and link it with Cloud Ahoy so we can compare the sim session with real life.

On a side note:  I moved my blog to a new server, setup SSL and in the process borked the image viewer/uploader.  I think I worked things out but it took me hours during this post to figure it out.  Stupid wordpress update.

Today is the day we were scheduled to take to the skies for the first, real, IFR flight lesson.  The forecast looked great leading up to today. Besides some frost on the airplane and an airmet Sierra for mist, it turned out to be a wonderful day.

We don’t fly with frost on the wings, period… full stop.  There is no reason to take that risk when you can just wait a little bit for the temperature to rise and the sun to do its work.  So while we waited for a natural defrost and fired up the simulator.

The simulator is an interesting tool.  It isn’t quite what you would normally expect in the era of Prepar3d and Xplane.  Think more like Microsoft flight Sim circa 1995.  Which is completely fine because who needs whizzbang graphics when you can’t really see where you’re going anyway.  The actual setup is pretty neat.  You have all of the normal flight controls and then you have a simulated instrument stack with physical knobs and buttons. I kinda wish I had that type of hardware on my fancy simulator at home.

We jumped right in and started building a”Pitch and Power Profile” for the simulated skyhawk.  Basically, the idea is that we would try power settings and pitch settings to see if we could get the climb, level flight, and descent conditions that we would expect.  This will help with the increased workload. Thinking about climb, level, and descent setup, just takes up brain power that could be spent talking to ATC or setting up your approach, etc. This all builds on the idea that we will be very predictable throughout the IFR flight.  Turns, headings, 500 ft/min  or 1000 ft/min climbs and descents.

Example profile:

Vx Climb -> Power: Full -> Pitch: +12 degrees -> Airspeed: 65 -> 900 ft/min

These don’t exactly translate to the real thing but they get you in the ballpark.

After about 45 minutes of building the profile chart by hand, I ran out to check on the airplane to see how the great and powerful sun was doing.  Most of the frost was gone so I spun the airplane around, using my mighty muscles (yeah, there is a joke in there somewhere), so that the sun could finish getting the frost off of the windscreen and leading edge.

After a quick talk we decided to go out and try to do the same thing we just did but instead of virtual reality, in reality reality.  After a quick 15 on the engine preheater, we jumped in the REAL skyhawk and I prepared to dazzle my new instructor with my elite flying skills.  In reality, I just wanted to fly reasonably competent so that I am representing my former instructor in a good light.  In short, I knew I had rust and was completely ready to be schooled.

As we went through the startup checklist, run-up etc.  I learned a few new things like what to do when I get to the item that says “IFR Taxi Check”.  Previously, since I am a VFR pilot I hit that item and looked around to assert that I am taxiing and it is indeed…. NOT IFR at the moment.  Of course it really means something totally useful as far as making sure that your primary instrument cluster is behaving properly before leaving the ground.  Kind of a useful thing if you are going to rely on them soon after leaving the ground.

I also learned how to usefully check that the autopilot will function properly.  My checkout instructor didn’t care for autopilots so he only taught me how to make sure it doesn’t make any noises while i’m flying. I could have pressed him to learn but if figured hand flying was more useful at my stage of development.  I am sure I will get more familiar with that as time goes on.

Oh yeah, I totally blew by a few information screens on the gps that my instructor wanted to go over with me. She played it cool and said we will go over that next time.

Skipping ahead, we take off and start our climb  As we climbed away from the airfield, it was pointed out that even in this simple by the numbers climb, we were basically on the Pitch and power profile that we outlined in the simulator.  Neato!

As we get to our cruise altitude, I hear the phrase that will probably ring out every flight from here on out.

“Go ahead and put on your foggles”.  I comply and now the game is afoot. (<- that spelling doesn’t look right but spell check says it’s all good, I not spell so good in other places either, sooo….)

We spent some time completing climbs and descents using the profile.  Along with some speed changes.  We followed this up with some steep turns and slow flight clean with a transition to dirty.  The bulk of the time she gave me headings and altitudes and I did my best to work on my scan and comply.

Overall it was a pretty good flight.  I had moments where I could feel the mental saturation starting to creep back in.  During debrief, we discussed how I pretty much had us in a spiral on my left steep turn.  We lost a good bit of altitude.  I think I did a little better on my right steep turn as some of my primary training started to kick back in.  On a side note, the G-forces are much more noticeable in a steep turn when you’re under the hood. Neato, dos!

I am looking forward to the next flight which is in little over a week.  I felt pretty good after 1.0 hrs of hood work.  I’m not nearly as fatigued as I felt during my primary training.  I think that is partly due to a combination of my overall flying experience and that the skyhawk behaves a lot more predictably than the mighty 152.  The pitch + power profiles also helped things out a bit I’m sure.  It was nice during my scan, most things were pretty much where they should be with only minor corrections needed.

In the 152, it always seemed that every instrument during the scan need a pretty sizeable correction everytime through.  Of course maybe it is just due to my Elite flying ability now, lol.  (Hazardous attitude detected, corrections applied)  Oh yeah, in the meantime…. back to studying for my next ground school class.

It was good to be back in the air training…It was a good day to fly!

Today I had my first IFR flight lesson. (minus the flight part though)  It has been coming for a while.  I had to cancel several flights due to my personal scheduling and then we had some legit snow in my area.  Normally, we get just a dustings of snow on top of 2 inches of ice. This time we got around 5 inches of legitimate fluffy snow!

Today the weather was IFR and better than previous attempts, but not great. We decided to meet and work on some ground school and maybe get some simulator time.  My new instructor and I have met before so it wasn’t hard to get past the intro and into the subject matter.  Today was mainly about paperwork, getting to know where I’m current in my flying, past training, etc.  She discussed the requirements for the instrument rating and asked me a few questions (light quizzing) on certain things.

ex. “What is required for IFR currency?”

I was able to answer a few, muddle through others and surrendered on yet others.

We chatted a bit about different subjects along the way and I think we will be a good fit in the cockpit.  Of course the true test is when we get up in the air and figure out how much of a mess that I am. 🙂

It sounds like we will start out by going up and doing some proficiency work so that she can assess my current abilities.  We will follow this up with some simulator time to work on my instrument scan and navigation.  After that we will be off to the races… err the wild blue yon… err  …hm… we’ll be off!

I am nervous a bit because it has been a while since I was a student.  It is an excited nervous, I am sure!

Any day you get to fly is a good day. I am looking forward to some good days!

A New Adventure

It has been a while since I have shared the harrowing tales that led to me earning my wings. Since my last post, I have taken friends and family on trips around the area to sight see or for the $100 hamburger. (More like $300 hamburger but I digress).

I have now come to a point in my journey where I want to expand my skills and professionalism as a pilot and take the obvious next step. Instrument Flight Training.

Some say the Instrument rating is the toughest rating to achieve. From both the standpoint of ground school and in the air, there are significant challenges. Many say that it is like starting your PPL all over again. I will find out soon enough and I will share each step of the journey with you. I am sure the path ahead will be filled with the feelings of frustration, excitement, and accomplishment. And if hunger becomes one of those feelings, maybe some cross country stops along the way to eat.

I am now flying the venerable Cessna 172 SkyHawk with a new instructor that will be with me through the highs and lows of my journey.

Off to study up on some VOR tracking and buy some foggles!