Saturday morning, we went up for my 5th lesson, steep turns (and scan review). We planned to start with a practice DME hold. As I was intercepting the radial for the hold, Bode’s base ops asked us to go to an air-to-air frequency. It turns out Tim had another student doing his long solo cross country that morning, and the check instructor found a problem with his logbook. So either the student had to sit there waiting for us to get back, or we had to head back early. I’d hate to ruin someone’s long cross-country and there were afternoon t-storms forecast, so if we didn’t get back until 10:00, he could be cutting it close (for a student pilot, anyway. Much different than the storm dodging Galen and I do now that we have 300 hours between us). Anyway, I figured I’d be the nice guy and offered to head in. We were northwest, so we could shoot the ILS22 approach and it wouldn’t slow us down more than a minute or two.

I had been doing pretty well with the intercept course, keeping the plane level at the assigned altitude. I flew the vectors approach gave us and intercepted the localizer and then glidescope without problem. Then I went braindead and flipped the meaning of the glidescope indicator. So I thought I was low when I was actually high. It took me too long to figure out what I had done, and i messed up the approach. Got it back under control right around decision height (the minimum altitude you can descend on the approach without seeing the runway), and made the landing. But I was fast and only had 10 degrees of flaps in and 200′ above the ground is no time to be adding more flaps, so I was stuck with that configuration. Landed a bit hot, but no harm. And it was definitely a learning experience — if the instruments aren’t doing what you expect, stop and think before you dig a whole.

No steep turns, so didn’t finish lesson 5. But that’s for tomorrow.