IFR Lesson #27
The club’s Cessna 182 is still missing a working ADF. As such, NDB approaches are out if we use that aircraft, so today’s lesson will be in the IFR Warrior, C-GXHO, again. Although that means everything will happen at a slower speed, the worst part of doing IFR flights in XHO is that XHO only has a single VOR as the second one is slaved to the GPS, though that slaving seems to be broken anyway. The 182 was my preferred aircraft to do the IFR flight test in; it has an HSI slaved to an external compass, a second VOR and, when it works, an ADF. Two VORs make testing easy, makes it possible to triangulate your position and makes it easy to follow Victor airways which aren’t straight. And two VORs also makes it easier to anticipate the interception of a specific radial. So, two VORs is good, one is much less good. The IFR Warrior has a moving map GPS instead of a second VOR, though the GPS is not approved for IFR use. So it’s basically useless in this case.
So I have decided that as a result, I will most probably do my flight test in the Warrior. All told, that may work out for the best anyway. I have tewn times as much time in the Warrior as I do in the Cessna 182 so that will mean that I will likely be far more at ease in the Warrior than in the 182. Though, since I want to fly the 182 more in the future, I will plan on taking future tests in the 182 (if I haven’t convinced myself to buy my own plane by that point). And the Warrior isn’t all that bad; it’s just a different aircraft for IFR than the 182.
After preflighting XHO, I gave my flight plan to instructor Jason who looked it over briefly and then told me to go file it. For the first two flights, Jason had filed the plan with FSS so this would be my first time filing an IFR flight plan. The results were good, as I’ve noted in this separate entry.
The flight path was pretty much the same as the previous IFR flight, with a hold over the Red Deer NDB followed by an approach. At the MDA, I took off the hood and saw runway 34 at CYQF and as per Jason’s instructions did a touch and go, which resulted in a rather steep short final given our height relative to the distance to the threshold. I then climbed out and followed the missed approach instructions, and calling up Edmonton Centre on the way back to the beacon. The plan was to then head to the Calgary VOR, where we wanted to do another approach.
Edmonton Centre cleared us to the Calgary VOR, at which point I told the controller that we’d like to do an approach at Calgary International after which we would cancel IFR and proceed to back to Springbank VFR. That seemed good enough for Centre and luckily Calgary Terminal was feeling nice (it seemed to be a good karma evening all around) and upon reaching Calgary Terminal space, we were vectored west and then cleared to intercept the localizer for ILS 16.
Once again, I kept our approach speed on the high end (around 95 kts) to help Terminal manager the other around us, which I think they appreciated. At one point, when we were number one for landing but still perhaps eight miles or so from touchdown, there were two commercial flights behind us, who were given their sequence numbers of two and three right after each other. I think the number two jet had noticed that they had flown through the localizer already and knew we were a training flight because he asked the terminal controller in a snide tone, ”Any idea when you are going to turn us?” The controller, without missing a beat, replied in a friendly, yet somewhat cheeky manner ”In just a few more miles… it’s for traffic.”. Jason and I looked at each other and snickered.
The rest of the ILS 16 approach was good except that we got a late clearance for the actual approach and I had to drop quite rapidly to keep the glideslope from going full down deflection. But everything worked out and when I looked up at the decision height runway 16 was right in front of me.
For those who are curious, you can see my flight on FlightAware.
Flight time: 2.5 hrs
Instrument time: 1.9 hrs (hood)
Approaches: 2
