More Simulated IFR

July 16th, 2010 • Comments Off

Finding myself out of currency for IFR, and suffering a prolonged period of heavy overcast here in San Diego, I called up my CFI to get my 6 approaches. It’s an expensive way to go for sure but I made myself feel better by saying to myself that I’d get some good Garmin 430 instruction which I might not get from a safety pilot.

The plan was to file tower en-route to Oceanside, do some holds before the VOR approach there. After that we would do the GPS into Palomar followed by the ILS, and then we’d head home to Montgomery Field for a GPS and two ILS approaches.

It pretty much went as planned other than the controller giving me the ILS in Palomar rather than the GPS. I was busy trying to work out what was going wrong with the vector onto the approach when my instructor caught it. So we did the ILS followed by the GPS. It was very useful here to have the ILS frequency already in the backup position on the nav.

I struggled with vertical descent control on all the approaches, mostly couldn’t get down fast enough. My CFI said I had too tight a grip on the yoke and when I was making course corrections I’d inadvertently adjust pitch too. It wasn’t bad enough that I would have missed any approaches but I was working way too hard, that’s for sure.

All in all a quite enjoyable time under the hood though I missed a spectacularly sunny day in San Diego, and I’m now IFR current through the end of January 2011.

Last night, for something to do, I went through the LiveATC.Net archive to try and find my communications and put together an audio clip. It was a lot harder work than I thought and after tracking me down on KMYF’s frequencies I abandoned the idea of going through Approach as well. So, here’s a little clip of me calling up for our clearance, taxi and take off, and back home on the last approach.