[yes, the entry is backdated. cope]

Today was practicing holds, with a couple of different entries, over the Socorro VOR (ONM). Winds aloft were fairly strong — out of the north at 30 knots at 9000′ MSL, so that made the hold a bit more interesting, as the real difficulty in holding is figuring out a wind correction angle that keeps you flying an oval over the point you want to be at. We did 4-5 holds over ONM, each one getting progressively better. I don’t know why, but it made a lot more sense than it did when we practiced them a couple months ago in the C-172. It’s possible that all the time with the flight simulator has helped.

Last hold was with a simulated ADI failure (the ADI is also called the attitude indicator or artificial horizon, and gives the attitude of the plane in two axis — bank and pitch. This is the central instrument for scanning the instrument panel when flying on instruments). I handled the failure pretty well and had no problems getting back from Socorro to Albuquerque without it. Due to construction, 3 of the runways (12/30, 3/21, and 17/35) were closed, leaving 8/26 as the only runway open. One of the commuter airliners was having issues with landing gear and doing low passes over the tower, so 8/26 was closed when we called in. This backed up traffic a bit, so I got to practice circling over a general spot under radar control, which was not fun (it’s all the fun of a hold, without knowing where you are. This would likely never be done under IFR, but since it was simulated instruments, it got me more instrument time). Anyway, they finally got traffic landing on 8 again, and after about 20 minutes of circling, it was our turn to land. Yippie.

Winds were out of the north at 8-10 knots, so I had some cross-wind to deal with. I also was coming in a bit hot because there was a 737 behind us to land. Long and short of it was that I floated that sucker for 2000 feet or so, and it was ugly. Actual touchdown was ok, not quite as centered as I would like, but actually acceptably smooth. But the approach was ugly, and that has to get fixed…