Sunday, April 13, 2008

IR Lesson No. 8 More Holds

Today's lesson pretty much mirrored last Sunday's lesson. Of course after a week off I needed to knock off some rust. Today we started to refine the procedures. I did the approach briefing, set up all my comm and nav's for my flight and selected the ILS RWY 6 approach for KABE, Allentown Lehigh International.

We started the flight at 3000' and somewhere north west of the East Texas ETX VOR. Also, from this lesson forward there will be wind and turbulence to deal with, obviously the honeymoon is over. As Brian previously stated there is no smooth IMC conditions,so deal with it. Ok, the ground rules are set and I need to step up my focus. The only real problem that I find myself having to correct is altitude. Yes, this is a real problem especially when flying instruments. It took me almost twenty minutes today to get my self squared away. I was plus or minus a hundred feet consistently and when going missed I leaned over to hit the OBS button on the Garmin 530 and nosed the plane over at the same time. I needed to keep my scan going but instead focused just briefly on the GPS which called for an immediate scan quickly followed by a recovery. Yikes, any passengers would have lost their lunch.

In review my hold patterns were good despite the winds and turbulence tossed at me. I worked on adjusting my outbound leg times in order to hit the 1 minute inbound to the intersection time. I had a nice tail wind inbound so it called for extending my outbound leg by 10 to 15 seconds. My altitude control was much better and the hold patterns looked good on the computer screen that the instructor is watching. I'm up again this wednesday followed by next sunday.

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