B like Busy….
According to my instructor, at this moment in my IFR training I have seen it all, I have learned all the procedures I ca do in my airplane and now all is left is to practice, practice, practice, fulfill the experience requirements and go for the checkride. After going through my logbook it looks like I need 15.2h IFR time and 9.8h cross country time. I still haven’t done my required IFR XC and it usually takes about 5h to complete. So subtracting that I needed ~10.5h instrument time and about 5h of XC time.
Today looked like everything aligned properly to get cut big chunk of those remaining things off. I had a day off, the weather was perfect as far as I could fly in my Skyhawk and to top things off Mark was in town and available. Mark in his day job is a first officer flying B777 cargo all over the place. He has plenty of experience flying in the system as well as in any kind of weather. I’m very grateful that I could tap into his experience and I’m using him whenever I can.
Initially I’ve just planned round robin route through 5 or 6 airports trying to pick different approach at each one of them. But when Nick (my CFII) saw it plotted on the map he suggested – ‘Hey, why don’t you take Mark and head to one of the class B airspaces around here? Have you ever been in one?’. No I was not and I was eager to try, so I quickly revised the route and came up with IA24 IOW BRL UIN STL KSUS. In addition to that I have planned one instrument approach at Burlington, IA and another one in Quincy, IL which with addition to approach at Spirit of At. Louis would give me 3 different approaches on my way down here.
Here is the kicker. When Mark came to the office and saw what I was cooking he said ‘hola, you’ve got to file IFR for that one, otherwise we’ll be hovering outside Bravo forever’. Again, you don’t have to tell me twice before that, I’m eager to lear the system so I grabbed the phone called 1-800-WXBRIEF and filed. I was a little bit surprised when I’ve heard that clearance will be ready the moment it’s typed in. All materials I’ve read so far suggested that you should file at least 30 minutes before planned departure and here the briefer says ‘I can give you your clearance right now but void time will be 10 minutes so I’d rather have you call me again when you’re ready or pick it up in the air’. I’ve decided not to rush things and put planned departure time in 20 minutes with the intention of picking clearance up in the air.
After that we got in the plane, did run-up check and took off. Picking up clearance in the air was quick and easy although I can understand why it’s not advisable – the amount of information the controle needs to relay blocks him for some time. Next time I’ll try to do it on the ground. Flight down south was uneventful. Being used to using flight following there wasn’t really that much difference and everything went smoothly. Center controllers were very accommodating and did not object when I asked for practice approaches to Burlington and Quincy.
Class B? Complete non event. The controller was busy but not that busy. He was very helpful not only to me but to other airplanes in the area and tried to let them into class Bravo as much as he could. But I got real life example of IFR flight plan usefulness – while we were humming along straight into class B airspace without as much as noticing it’s boundary on the map there was a Cirrus behind us that got hit bey dreaded ‘stay clear of class B airspace, expect further clearance in 10 minutes’. That’s exactly the situation Mark wanted to avoid on for that very reason it was worth to file.
Here is our path on the way down:
After arriving at Aero Charter FBO we were greeted with smile and keys to crew car so we ordered some fuel and headed for lunch. While planning our route back we have decided to pretty much fly it the same way back skipping this time Quincy and Burlington making an approach to iowa City instead. Quick file and clearance was again ready within 10 minutes. Flight back was even more uneventful than the one down south. Strong headwinds made it very long though, there were times where our groundspeed was in 60kt range. Ouch!
Here is our return path:
All in al it was very productive flight. I got 5.8h simulated instrument time, shot four different approaches (DME arc, LOC BC, ILS and VOR) and went through quite a chunk of country:
And did all of that before 5pm!
6.0h (5.8h inst) : 2 to/ldg logged
142.1h (30.8h inst): 460 to/ldg total
