Today was instrument flight #4. According to the syllabus, the flight is mostly a review flight, working basic maneuvering. The new topic is copying simple clearances. Since actually filing an IFR flight plan on a CAVU (ceiling and visibility unlimited) day is a sure way to piss off the controllers, we just practiced back and forth in the plane. I got behind copying down and couldn’t catch up, so I blew it. I should have dropped the missed parts and gotten the rest. That way, the amount of information the controller must repeat is less. Oh well, I’ll get better. It’s actually slightly more difficult in the practice mode because you don’t know what’s coming. I can be pretty sure when filing IFR from ABQ to Phoenix, for example, that I’m going to depart, turn towards the ABQ VOR on the west side of town, then pick up an airway that heads west.

We then went up and worked on maneuvers, starting with VOR/DME holds. We were holding on the 320 radial of the Albuquerque VOR at 15 DME, heading Northwest. The airport is southeast of this position, and we were holding as if we would be continuing to the northwest. This means entering using a parallel entry (see here for holding pattern entries. It took two loops through the hold to get a wind correction angle, mostly because I was just fighting to fly the plane. I’m still way behind the G1000 panel, even compared to the glass cockpit in N813T. It takes me too long to find things like the clock or the wind direction/strength. But I’m getting there.

Did some more partial panel work, which on the G1000 means flying with the backup instruments that are way out of the way (like this). The compass was being a little funky, but I think I did pretty well.

I only had one time where I let the plane start to get away from me. Tim (my instructor) told me to proceed directly to KAEG (Double Eagle II, the home airport for the flight school). While I was loading a direct route to KAEG into the GPS and then changing the HSI from VOR to GPS mode (the CDI is the dial that tells you which way you need to be pointing. VOR is the radio receiver and GPS is, well, the course the GPS is trying to get me to.). I let the plane start to descend quickly. Thankfully, managed to recover in plenty of time and Tim never had to take the controls, so at least there’s that. But learned an important lesson — don’t stop the scan while you’re dialing in radio frequencies or programming the GPS. In real IFR flight in a modern airplane, you’d have the autopilot doing the flying while you’re doing the programming. But the autopilot fails, so we do all the training without it.

Sunday is lesson number 5. We’ll be doing steep turns under the hood and then more review.