IFR Lesson #14
Jason called me this morning and asked if I could come in early for my sim booking. The ceilings at Calgary/Springbank were fluxuating between 300 and 1000 feet, so pretty much all his bookings (in fact all the club’s bookings) were cancelled. I agreed, and after gobbling down some breakfast and swinging by Zymeta to restart our Telus ADSL modem after a power outage, drove like a maniac out to the club.
When I arrived at the airport and turned onto MacLaurin Drive I was suprised to see a retractable on what looked to be a fast approach… with gear up. Ever the optimist I figured the pilot must be doing it on purpose, though in the back of my mind I wondered if I might see my first accident. Of course, with ceilings so low that no one was in the circuit, I’m sure the tower controller was watching the aircraft and had it not been some sort of authorized maneuver, would have told the pilot that his gear was up. In any case, by the time I had parked the car, the aircraft had pulled up and seemed to disappear into the cloud.
Today was another day of NDB holds, again with wind. My grasp on holds is much better now. I have no issues with the type of entry to use and I am almost to the point where everything just flows. But that only happens when I am able to keep ahead of everything, which I sometimes find a little hard to do with the elevator so touchy on simulator. I can see hand flying holds and approaches to be a lot fun for real but there is something to be said for an autopilot that will do most of that for you while you write down a clearance or set up for an approach.
For example, today I accepted a hold clearance from Jason (aka ATC) and as I was figuring out everything I blew by the beacon. In this case, Jason let me fumble around for 15 seconds until I simply asked if he could put me back again so I could get organized and try again. While I realize that simply isn’t possible in real life, today is training and a man can only fall behind and fumble around for so long before frustration sets in. The second time around was much better.
I am, however, still trying to account for wind from hold to hold, when it’s more than likely that this will never be the case. So I have vowed to never again try to account for the wind on the first ‘lap’ unless I’m 110% sure of where the wind is coming from. The Garmin GPS in GXHO has a cool feature where you tell it your magnetic heading and airspeed and it tells you the wind speed and direction, which would be awfully handy for times like this. The other lesson I learned today is that no matter how good you are, you are rarely going to execute a hold that is perfect, mostly due to fluxuating wind direction and speed. Up until this point, the possibility of that had never entered my mind but I guess the Wlite software we are using is smart enough to vary the wind.
Overall, today was a good sim day and I’m glad to be leaving holds behind now (for the time being) and moving onto approaches.
Sim Time: 1.1 hrs
