1.1 Hours Closer

Today was not really a good day to prep for the checkride. The visibility was more than 5 miles, but the ceilings were around 2000 feet. It was marginal VFR, which is good enough for flying if you stay out of the clouds, but not really good for doing stalls and steep turns and such. You need a little bit more altitude to keep those maneuvers safe.

Instead, we just put a big dent in my remaining instrument time today. Mostly we did holding patterns. We picked an airspace fix out east of the airport called SLANT. We basically made for the fix and as soon as we overflew it started a standard rate turn to 180° in the opposite direction. A standard rate turn is a turn with a bank of 15° and takes exactly 1 minute to turn 180°. So you time the turn for exactly 1 minute. Then fly out 1 minute, then turn 180° in exactly 1 minute back toward the fix... and so on. What makes it tricky is the wind. You have to crab into the wind to prevent being blown off course, so even though inbound might be a heading of 090°, you might have to steer to 115°. So we did that and practiced holds (very important to master in instrument flight) and after that, we actually flew the GPS approach to Runway 17 at McKinney.

This was quite interesting because the aircraft I was in has a new GPS with WAAS installed. WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) is the latest technology that improves the accuracy of GPS to the point that a WAAS approach is more accurate than ILS. In short, WAAS has an accuracy of 16 meters laterally and 4 meters vertically. So, we punched up the RNAV17 approach to TKI on the GPS and activated the flight plane and it routed according to the published approach plate (RNAV17_TKI), and made for KARLA, then using a standard rate turn, turned to VELCI, then a standard rate turn to IKOTY where we picked up the LPV (Lateral-precision with vertical guidance) otherwise known as the glideslope, reduced power and trimmed for 90 knots and just tried to keep the needs on the instrument centered (horizonally and vertically) as pictured below.

When we got to about 200 feet, I was given the okay to remove the foggles and land the plane. This is not an easy task when you've been looking down at the instrument panel for an hour and now have to look outside the window and line everything up and land, but I was able to put the plane down just fine, even with a higher approach speed than normal. I think I even landed with no flaps.

... And I almost forgot, the Aritificial Horizon was acting weird during the flight, it was indicating a lean to the right when I was straight and level, so we covered it up and practiced IFR with a partial panel. Not easy and not fun. IFR flying is a lot of work... your eyes have to constantly be on the move and have to monitor altitude, heading and level flight with no outside references. When you throw in turbulence and crosswinds, you can really get turned around in a very short time.

Overall it's a good experience, but it's very exhausting.

To recap, I need 0.6 hours of instrument time and 2.7 hours of overall time to have met all the prerequisites for the FAA checkride.

Updated Pilot Log