Instrument Lesson #2

I guess I needed some humbling after last time because Friday’s flight wasn’t nearly as pleasant or successful as my first training flight. My CFII gave me a choice. First, VOR work around a nearby facility, interspersed with pattern work. And no, I’m not talking about airport traffic patterns, either. I’m talking about these. Under the hood. By timing only – no reference to the DG is permitted.

Second, a cross-country flight to a towered field where we’d fly an approach or two, then return. To include some VOR tracking and possibly some pattern work along the way. I went with option #2.

I spent about $50 in airplane rental setting up the radios before we ever started to taxi. The training aircraft has a second nav/comm and the required audio panel to switch between the two. Neither radio remotely resembles my single radio. So, despite having flown this setup once before, it’s still very foreign to me. Rather intuitive, yes, but unfamiliar enough to cost time. I guess it is better to familiarize on the ground instead of in the terminal phase of an approach when there is no extra time to be had. My budget just wishes that the prop hadn’t been spinning.

Once airborne, I went under the hood and pointed in the direction of our destination as we climbed to our en route altitude. He briefed the approach, tried to pick up the VOR on the #2 nav, then had me switch the primary nav from GPS to VOR when the #2 didn’t work as he expected. We were a good distance away from the station, there was no radio issue. There was lots of wind aloft, so I had to hold 20-30 degrees of correction to maintain ground track. Then he was ready to call Seymour Johnson Approach to pick up flight following and request vectors for the ILS approach that Kinston was using. I let him do that, as flying the plane in addition to all the fiddling with the unfamiliar radios already had me frazzled.

As luck would have it, Approach had nothing to do and nobody to talk to, so we got all their attention. Instead of letting us track inbound on the VOR for a bit longer, they started vectoring us for the approach. Then, they handed us off to another Approach frequency (still SJ, but not the frequency on the approach plate) for a few more heading changes, cleared us for the approach and bounced us to Tower. We weren’t established inbound on the approach yet, so I was still lining up the airplane.

I made no effort to do comms. I was well beyond task saturation, and it was all I could do to keep the shiny side up and roughly in the part of the air assigned. When we hit minimums, he had me go visual and land the plane. I was lined up with the taxiway, not the runway, and I only had 200 feet of altitude to get it over the runway and down. Fortunately, they have 11,000 feet of asphalt, so there was no huge rush. Remember the wind? Well, I side-loaded the plane pretty badly and got a nice bounce, but I got it down without breaking anything. We made it a touch-and-go.

On initial contact, we indicated that we wanted to do two approaches before heading back home. Climbing out, though, I told CFII that I was done and wanted to go back home. He advised ATC and we did some VOR work as we flew the forty-five minutes back. No cursed pattern work, thankfully.

Our localizer is out of service, so we shot an RNAV approach back into TTA. I did pretty good until the last couple hundred feet, at which point I started to drift off and then “corrected” in the opposite direction. I got it back under control, but was about 20 knots fast on short final. Despite this, I managed only a mild balloon on my flare, was (mostly) on centerline, and did probably my best Cessna landing since I started flying again. Definitely the best one with the current instructor. It wasn’t good, mind you, just not blow-a-tire horrible. About the time I get high-wing landings down again, I’ll be back in my plane and will have to re-learn how to land a low-wing.