I asked him where he would like to go, knowing that the ‘regular’ route for instrument rating XC is IA24-KALO-KMCW-KIKV-IA24, to which he responded ‘Surprise me’. You don’t have to tell me that twice. Keeping in mind his desire to expose students to class Bravo I’ve fired up my iPad and looked around. I’ve been to St. Louis class B two weeks ago, so let’s pick Minneapolis.

Few minutes later I had planned route. IA24 – Waterloo/KALO (with LOC BC 30 approach) – Mason City/KMCW (with VOR/DME 18 approach) – Flying Cloud Minneapolis/KFMC (with ILS 10R approach. For the return trip I’ve decided that we either reverse trip up (which would give me another 3 approaches) or in case we needed to get down faster we could go direct (as direct as airways allow, but still pretty direct).

Now the biggest problem, weather. When we met in the airport office at 8 am I saw from his face that he doesn’t like what he sees outside. Visibility was around 1 mile with mist and patches of fog. Both of us were concerned about icing possibility. It’s late November after all. But checking all available charts and PIREPS suggested that there will be no icing in the clouds. RUC soundings suggested that cloud tops will be around 3000ft and that there is strong low level temperature inversion that will keep us safe once we get airborne.

We have analyzed our possible options and alternatives and decided that it’s a go. Few minutes later we were airborn. It turned out that skewT diagram was absolutely right. The lowest temperatures we saw wat +1C and it was on the ground at Green Castle. The higher we went, the higher the temperature was topping at about +10C at 4000ft.

It was my first “real” IMC flight. By real I mean that I did not have to use foggles even for a minute. Shortly after taking off we went into clouds. Strange feeling not seeing anything outside. But short few minutes later we emerged from the clouds and for next 40 minutes everything around looked like on this picture:

Nice uh? Anyway, flying on top of solid overcast is even harder than I expected. Your theoretically see, but you still have to fly precisely and you can’t really trust what you see because cloud layers tend to be sloped and create false horizons. Anyway, what seemed to be just minutes later, it was time to prepare for my first approach of the day. I flew this particular one four times before already so it wasn’t anything new except of two things. First – strange feeling when ‘diving into cloud’ and very warm experience when I saw runway lights exactly were they were supposed to be when we came down from the clouds. So that’s what the whole instrument flying is all about! You spent hour(s) up there baking your face in the sun alone, then you dive through the clouds and the runway is exactly where it’s supposed to be.

After quick touch and go off we went to our second destination. Nothing different here. The controller cut us loose about 20 miles from the airport with ask to report back on the frequency after missed approach. Which we did few minutes later and were kindly greeted with N7717U Minneapolis Center, report reaching 4000ft and established on V505. Uh? Short glance ant the map told us what was going on. Mason City is in the area where minimum radar altitude is around 4500ft so controller could not see us. Few minutes later he started reporting us to an airliner going the opposite way. To make his work easier we requested climb to 6000ft and shortly after started blinking on his radar. That made his (and ours) work much easier and the rest of the flight went uneventful.

Minneapolis Approach was a little busier than St. Louis’ one but nothing really bad. I’ve heard Cedar Rapids as busy as this one was at times. I understand that they have plethora of frequencies so I probably did not hear half of it but I did not care as long as I could understand what they wanted from me to do and could comply.

2011.11.23 IR lesson a

Looking at the time we’ve decided to head back directly to KCID. Quick weather check revealed that conditions did not improve and that we may need to land in KCID. Again quick file and off we went. I’ve flew quite a lot to and from class C airports so nothing new here other than one thing – I got instructed to line up and wait. There was a lot of buzz about that phrase recently so I should be familiar with it, but I’ve never received it in real life so my brain did not record it properly (yes, I was expecting ‘clear for takeoff’) and it took me a second to process it. After that everything else was easy. We took off and headed down south. With a little bit of tailwind, which made our mighty Skyhawk to break the barrier of 100knots ground speed, it took us just above 2h to get down to Cedar Rapids.

Weather check revealed that conditions in Cedar Rapids did not improve much. Visibility was 1 1/2 miles and ceiling was 800ft overcast. Sounds bad? Not really. If I was a VFR pilot it was definitely ‘stay on the ground’ day. But for an IFR practice/training flight – perfect weather. Which was promptly confirmed on the frequency. The air was busy with all kind of airplanes shooting approaches one after one. After all not every day you get 800feet solid overcast with tops at 3000ft and completely no icing hazard in late November.

I shot ILS 27 approach and then requested special VFR back to Green Castle which was promptly granted. As it turned out there was also another club member waiting impatiently on the ground for the Skyhawk to return so he could get some real IMC time before his instrument checkride. That’s airplane utilization – it was less than 15 minutes on the ground!

2011.11.23 IR lesson b

With this flight I fulfilled almost all experience requirements for my training. At this moment I have 1.2h required instrument time lest which I’m going to use to brush up my maneuvering and partial panel skills.

5.7h (5.5h inst) : 6 to/ldg logged
150.5h (38.8h inst): 476 to/ldg total

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:

2011.11.11 IR practice a

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:

2011.11.11 IR practice b

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

This lesson was a continuation of VOR/DME work I’ve started last time. Looking at my total record sheet we have decided that another 50nm cross country flight is in order. Trying to pick reasonably complicated route without overloading my senses we came up with:

IA24-CID-ALO-KALO-INDET-CID-IA24

The original idea was to introduce intersection (INDET) and try working two VORs. Unfortunately it turned out that NAV part of display on second radio in our Skyhawk is dying and became completely unreliable. But treating it as only slight inconvenience we’ve decided to play with DME. INDET intersection is defined as ALO VOR 090 DME 23. and as it turned out during the flight it was an easy find.

Another good outcome of picking KCID-KALO routes is that I was within TRACONs’ range during whole flight and it gave me nice opportunity to add radio communication into instrument flight mix. My ability to multitask it still somewhat limited by instrument flying load factor but I’m finally getting ahold of things and it’s high time to throw radio in the mix before I start working on approaches.

Post flight briefing notes:
As you may see on the track there is a very pronounced change of course in the middle between CID and ALO despite the fact that tracking this airway should be simple frequency switch. But when I switched frequencies the needle immediately went way to the left and instead of waiting patiently few seconds I started fiddling with CDI and turning left. Nick pointed to me that being so far out from VOR means that slight left/right deviation may actually mean several miles and cause those seemingly big CDI changes, but if I waited a bit longer the needle should come back at least in the vicinity of zero and my track would look much nicer

2011.09.22 IR lesson 4

Generally steep turns and stalls weren’t a maneuvers I loved. Not because they scared me, but because I don’t feel proficient enough in them even in VFR to be comfortable doing them under the hood when I have no visual reference to the horizon to help me executing them. Nothing that practice can’t take care of. First two steep turns were ugly, but then with a little bit of coaching from Nick on how to enter steep turn and how Skyhawks differ from Cherokees (you actually have to use rudders, you know?) next two were quite decent, no worse than any on my VFR ones. Stalls were even more non event as I’ve practiced them recently in VFR conditions just to make sure I’m proficient in them.

During our return to the airport Nick wanted me to execute nice, tight pattern within 1NM distance from the runway at all time. Not a problem at all… with the exception that Skyhawk is no Cherokee and you can’t really execute crowbar type of approaches Cherokees are famous for. Still managed to get it safely on the ground and stop before the end of the runway.

See the pattern? Looks like the hardest thing to do will be to break my Cherokee habits and learn how to fly Skyhawk, under the hood or not.

All in all – full hour of hard work but I’m happy with the results. Controlling airplane under the hood becomes easier and easier, and it turns out that Skyhawks don’t bite (but I still don’t like flying Cessnas )

GPS Track

GPS Track

I met with Nick at 7am ready for takeoff, and shortly afterwards we were up in the air. Simulating low ceiling I put the hood at about 700ft AGL and off we went. As I still need some cross country time for IR ticket we headed in the general direction of Newton for the intention of making a landing there so I can log it as 50nm XC flight.

As for every first lessons today’s covered basics. Straight and level flight, standard rate turns, constant speed and constant rate climbs and descents. Nothing fancy. But that simply stuff was enough to show me that I almost completely forgot what I have learned during my PPL course. It wasn’t anything major, but still keeping the scan going and all needles where they were supposed to be was harder than I expected.

Especially altitude was playing tricks on me. And that is going to take a lot of skills honing as Arrow is quite pitch sensitive and likes to run away from you, especially if you have a tendency to use death grip on the yoke (which unfortunately I still have from time to time).

Turns weren’t that much nicer in the beginning until I forced myself to stop flying it by the feel and started to actually see and react to instruments. Couple of last turns turned out really nicely.

One very interesting thing (and the reason why I picked Nick for my instructor) was approach and landing at Newton. Nick works as an airline pilot in his day job and as such works the system every day. So he decided to play a little bit of ATC on me and vectored me for the visual approach like it was given by real controller:
- Arrow 36T turn left heading 160, maintain 2000ft expect visual approach runway 14
then just seconds after I turned 160 he added
- Arrow 36T cleared for visual approach runway 14… now take your googles off and land the airplane.
I looked outside and here I was – almost perfectly aligned with the runway on 5 miles final. Pretty damn neat considering that last time I knew where I was was back at the home airport some 60nm away . Quick touch and go and we were back in the air. This time the ceiling was even lower, I ‘lost visual’ at 400ft AGL in climbing left turn. Same thing happened back at Green Castle. I start to like it a lot. Can’t wait until we get to VOR tracking and all this stuff that will let me know where I am a little bit more often.

GPS track

1.5h (1.4h inst) : 2 to/ldg logged
107.1h (4.6h inst): 429 to/ldg total

But if it was for the weather this flight wouldn’t ever make this column. But, as it happens, many (if not most) CFII tent to teach that we should operate constant speed propellers in a ‘squared’ manner. Some even say that you should never operate aircraft engines with manifold pressure (in inches Hg) higher than RPMs (in hundreds). Hence the famous 23 (or 24) squared meaning 23″ of manifold pressure and 2300 RPM. Being an engineer myself I always question such strong statements (always/never) especially when engine manufacturer’s manual clearly shows that the engine can be operated in other ways. Over the last few weeks I was reading some materials on the Internet. I especially like John Deakin’s column at AvWeb. His arguments make a lot of sense in my precise brain and I agree with (almost) all he says. One of the things he teaches is that whenever it’s possible we should fly WOT (wide open throttle). So knowing that I’ll have 0.5h each way to (literally) burn off I prepared myself and decided to try what John Deakin teaches in practice.

Main principle in his theory is that the air is free and any operations when the throttle is not wide open (unless it’s of course warranted by other flight conditions) it’s basically just a waste of time, speed and ultimately money, as the airplane engine with closed throttle is not as efficient as at WOT operations. So following John’s advice I took off and left the throttle wide open. As you may remember Green Castle lies below Cedar Rapid’s class C airspace so quick communication ordeal was in order. After having squawk assigned I kept climbing at rather brisk pace and quickly reached 5500ft. Somewhere in between I started to slowly back retard propeller handle and got RPMs down to about 2300 and my destination altitude. At that altitude the engine was getting only about 25″ of manifold pressure. Preparing for this flight I’ve checked Arrow’s POH and Piper allows to operate it’s engine about 4″ oversquare so my 2″ were right within allowed range. I kept waiting for any negative symptoms of such operations but couldn’t find any. The engine was humming and pulling me along. The airplane was flying around 130KTAS smooth and happy. Next time I had to touch the throttle was wen I started the descent to Ford Madison. One OWT (old wives tale) put to bed. Operating WOT will now became my modus operandi.

During that flight I did one more thing I’ve read in John’s articles – for the first time I did ‘the big pull’. So for the most of the flight my quadrant looked like this:
. But that’s a material for another story, when I get more data in.

I went to the airport with the intention to finish my Arrow checkout. These days aviation is ruled by insurance companies and more often that not they are dictating what is legal or not. The FAA says that I need a complex rating to fly the Arrow. Our insurance company says, that I need at least 10h dual in the Arrow to do it. Good for me that I did not have the complex rating so I could use some of those 10 to get one. Which I did. Terry endorsed me after 5.5h dual. But I still needed to burn off those remaining 4.5.

After last week trip for lunch I was left with 1.7h required to finish the job today. So I opened weathermeister website and tried to pick up a route that would give me about 120-140 nautical miles range and 2 or 3 landings at different airports. Trying to rack up some hours for my IFR ticket I also needed to have at least one 50nm leg. So I’ve picked the 133.5 nm route: IA24 KTNU KPEA IA24. All three airports have runway that were more or less aligned with the wind (down to 10 degrees off the centerline).

The flight was good. Visibility was great and when I climbed a bit you could easily spot landmarks some 20 miles away. Strong winds made some interesting landings too. With wind gusting up to 30kt your groundspeed at touchdown is just around 40mph which gives quite short ground rolls. So short that I had to actually taxi on the runway in Newton to make the first taxiway despite it being at 1000ft mark.

After we got back to Green Castle it turned out that I’m still missing couple of tenths so we taxied back and took off for another round. But this time there was a surprise waiting for me. Just when I dropped down the gear and started configuring the airplane for landing the engine coughed and went to idle. No previous signs of any trouble no warning at all. Short evaluation led to the decision – I will make the runway. I trimmed the airplane immediately to keep the best glide speed and started turning towards the runway. Keeping in mind that speed is everything I went through emergency restart checklist, but everything looked normal. Not having time to play with it anymore I committed myself to landing. Now the biggest part of it all wat to not hit the trees. If you’ve seen Green Castle before you know what I mean. Bunch of trees on the left side of the runway 33 threshold makes for some interesting flying around the trees there. I made it easily but there was one more surprise coming at me. The ground rush. So severe I’ve never experienced it before. Neither C-172 nor Cherokee weren’t coming down nearly as fast as the Arrow does. Grass was completely blurred. That caught me a little by surprise, but I got it together quickly. When I was maybe 15-20 ft above the runway I quickly pulled all flaps (thans to johnson bar it’s trivial in Arrow). That instantaneously stabilized the airplane and made for one of the nicest landings I made today. Not only I was able to walk away, but the airplane was still flyable.

Yes, it was just simulated emergency landing. But because it wasn’t being called for before it was almost like real – definitely bumped things up a notch.

When we taxied back to the hangar, the hobs meter just clicked past the 1.7h mark for the flight completing my 10h dual insurance requirement.

1.7h : 4 to/ldg logged
86h : 384 to/ldg total

Initially the plan was to go to Dubuque (KDBQ) but as I was unable to confirm that the airport cafe is still in business we’ve decided to go to Prairie du Chien (KPDC) instead. Preflown and gassed up we took off at 12pm sharp and headed north west. I rehearsed my lines to Cedar Rapid’s controller several times before (communication is still my weak point) so the initial exchange of formalities went smoothly and we went on course.

We had a bit of a headwind so I wanted to stay low, but that quickly turned out to be a very bad idea. The spring has come recently, but the grass and crops did not turned green yet. Which meas a lot of exposure area and extreme thermals. Every few minutes someone on the frequency was requesting climb to higher altitudes, and so did we. Initially at 3500ft we quickly ended up at 5500ft just below the clouds.

It wasn’t smooth up there either, but at least it was bearable. Thanks to Arrow’s speed the flight was relatively short, and we were on the ground in Prairie du Chien. Unfortunately our favorite burger place was closed for lunch so the $100 burger turned into hibachi grill lunch. Tasty and funny to watch.

With full stomachs we headed back to the airport and took of on our way back home. This time we climbed to 6500ft without even checking what is going on down low. Nice thing was that with the amount of tailwind I was seing groundspeed in areas of 150kt. That brought us back to Green Castle in just a little over 30 minutes. Not bad.

Interesting thing happened on our way back though. Our track was going through Cedar Rapids’ class C and their controller requested that I fly exactly over the top of the airport at altitude no lower than 3000ft. I understand that was to keep me out of their approach and departure paths without having me to fly around in huge circle. Nice idea, and nice that they want to save use some time and money too.

After this flight my current complex logged time is 8.3h. I need just 1.7h more to be able to fly it on my own. Yuppie!

P.S. Iza was taking pictures during this flight. If you want to see some more click on the one above and head out to her blog.

1.8h : 2 to/ldg logged
84.3h : 380 to/ldg total

With the exception that when we got there it was almost directly aligned with the runway. It still messed me up a bit on base though. Every time when I have a tailwind on base I have problems with overshooting the runway. Still have to work on that to remember to actually widen pattern a little bit in those cases so I bet aligned better on final. Iowa City has right hand traffic on 12 which added to the problem a bit. I flew right hand traffic probably less than 20 times so far, having runway from that side makes it still tricky.

After three touch and goes we went to Washington. This leg was a little longer that the one to Iowa City so I had a chance to play with Arrow’s autopilot. It was my first time ever to fly an auto piloted airplane and I have to say that even such simply 1 axis autopilot takes quite a lot from pilot’s load. You just dial in heading, trim the airplane for level flight and you are pretty much set. That is as long as you won’t forget to turn it off just before entering patter so both of you don’t fight for the control .

After Washington there was Muscatine and Tipton. Nothing really worth mentioning other than Tipton’s runway has shown me again why you should study airport layout carefully before you try to land. Runway 11 is sloped downhill and it has thrown me a curve, it kept running away from me and as a result I did quite ugly landing.

Then we went back to Green Castle and here Terry caught me by surprise. When I was on downwind he dimmed dashboard light off which as a result turned off landing gear lights. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with it, other than I did my whole GUMPS check, I even touched the gear handle, and I failed to notice that the lights are off. It should have rang a bell in my head. Now after I got back home I remember than I saw lights when I extended gear the first time. And I assume that once they are down they stay down, yet it was my obvious mistake. Well, they say that you never really learn to avoid mistakes until you make them. Now I have done this and hopefully I won’t do it again.

As a remark, with the exception of Tipton’s landing all remaining 6 ones were very nice and I’m quite happy with my performance here, especially considering the fact that each of those runways had different width ranging from 20 through 50 and 60 to 75 feet.

After we put the airplane on the ground and finished all paperwork Terry signed my logbook on one of the last pages

As of today I have my complex rating (which I can do nothing with yet as insurance requires 10h dual before I can fly Arrow solo) and my flight review clock started ticking from the beginning – I’m good for another 2 years!

2.1h : 7 to/ldg logged
80.3h : 364 to/ldg total