Continuing with my theme of ridiculously procrastinating on updating this thing, I’m now actually two flights behind. *sigh* I’ll start by rolling the clock back a full week, to last Thursday evening. For this particular session, the objective was to wrap up my night requirements and at least put a dent in simulated instrument time. As such, I arrived at PDK a bit after 5 PM, muttering quietly to myself how glad I was that that route wasn’t part of my daily commute.
Before heading out, Scott and I spent a bit of time discussing my current status with respect to training standards, along with serious talks about getting the written exam out of the way. I still needed to study up on some areas, particularly weather services, but outside of that I felt pretty good about my knowledge. From there, we covered fundamentals of instrument flight; primary and secondary instruments for pitch and roll, keeping a proper scan going, looking out for instruments to disagree, etc. A few minutes of this, and then we went out and got in the air.
Scott let me get about 1000′ up before taking the airplane while I put on the dreaded Foggles. I’d worn these evil things before, but that didn’t make matters any better. I settled into attempting to maintain my climb and heading. Right away, I could tell I had little to no scan at all… rather than keeping an orderly watch of things, I was glancing here and there, with the result that I was chasing my tail, a lot. Coupled with that was my body’s insistence that a slight turn to the left was really level flight. I thought I did OK my first time out under the hood, but this time I was all over the place… constantly stopping that pesky left turn, oh, now I’m descending, stop the descent, back to the turn, argh… As if this wasn’t enough work, Scott would occasionally have me work with the GPS and such, which would generally lead to even-worse deviations from my desired course and altitude. Lesson of the day was definitely that instrument flying is a brain-intensive task, and it takes very little distraction to throw everything into disarray.
Oh, and that was just basic, straight-and-level flying with the occasional turn. It was going to get better. First and most fun might have been compass turns. See, generally one turns while referring to the directional gyro (DG), which is immune to the errors the magnetic compass introduces. To put it briefly the magnetic compass only reads correctly while flying straight-and-level at a constant speed. Accelerate, decelerate, or make a turn, and errors come into play. This is particularly true of turning… we’d discusses back on the ground how to estimate turning error in order to better make compass turns, but I apparently failed to internalize that. I started my first turn, with Scott covering the DG and me eyeballing the compass. I knew the error was there, but vastly underestimated it… when I rolled out on what was supposed to be a northerly heading, I watched the compass continue on over to about 020 or so. A rather impressive display. The next few times, I got it much better, having learned my lesson.
Then there were climbs and descents. These come in two flavors: constant-airspeed and constant-vertical speed. The former are fairly easy, the latter, not so much. The reason for this is that the VSI has a bit of a lag to it, so while one can easily attain a constant-airspeed climb by eyeing the airspeed indicator, trying to do the same with the VSI results in a vicious sort of tail-chasing game. Instead, one must select a pitch attitude while watching the AI, let the VSI stabilize, correct the pitch attitude, check the VSI, over and over again. Even after I worked this out, I still had to stop myself from trying to fly off the VSI… the temptation is strong indeed.
By this time, we were getting close to RMG, where I could get in my last few required night landings. In keeping with the instrument theme, though, Scott had me fly the ILS into RMG. This isn’t a required task for a private pilot, but is still a good thing to know in case of an emergency. Here, Scott played the role of a controller vectoring me onto the ILS, while I played the part of a really bad instrument pilot. Finally, though, I was able to capture the runway heading and glide slope, and followed it down for a bit until Scott told me to take off the Foggles.
This, by the way, is a surprisingly disorienting transition. Under the hood, my entire life was contained in about 36 square inches of instrument panel. Looking outside the airplane again almost seemed like information overload. Landing can be a bit of a busy time anyway, but doing so while fighting that disorientation is a real challenge. In a way, it felt like I was starting the whole evolution about ten steps behind the airplane. Still, I got it down safely, and proceeded to take few more runs around the pattern. Of course, about the time I was getting comfortable again, it was time to head back towards PDK… and that meant that I got to put my favorite torture device back on.
Nothing really new happened here, except that I was getting better, particularly with my climbs and descents. Still had trouble maintaining altitude, and a few times I exceeded a 100′ margin from my desired altitude- enough to fail me on the checkride. Definitely got to get that in order in the near future. I also flew a few simulated holding patterns; basically a timed turn followed by a timed straight stretch, all working out a nice little racetrack pattern in the sky.
The last bit of fun was getting into PDK. Previously, when we flew to LZU, I though it was hard to pick the airport out. I had no idea what hard was. PDK sits right in the middle of a well-populated area NE of Atlanta. I picked up the airport beacon immediately after removing the Foggles, but could not for the life of me pick out the runways. About the best I could manage was a guess based on the beacon, the runway headings, and my heading. I still hadn’t identified them when Scott told me to turn onto my downwind. Finally, I picked out 2L and 2R, which was fine until it came time to make my base turn. Once again, I had trouble picking them out… I saw what I thought was 2R, but didn’t catch 2L until I was turning final. All in all, it was a truly challenging task.
This flight satisfied my night requirements, but still left me with more required instrument time… which is just as well, as I clearly need plenty more practice at that. For the most part, I’ve enjoyed my training so far, but I suspect that terms like “fun” and “enjoy” probably wouldn’t apply quite so readily to working on an instrument rating. It’s something I want to do eventually, if for no other reason than safety, but my bit of hood time sure does give me a critical perspective on that bit of fun. I wouldn’t feel at all out of line to refer to instrument flying as Hard Work.
