IFR Training – Cross Country Completed
Among the requirements for the IFR rating is the IFR Cross Country flight. It must me a flight of 250 nautical miles along airways or by directed routing from an air traffic control facility, an instrument approach at each airport, and three different kinds of approaches with the use of navigation systems. I reviewed distances […]
IFR Training – I Brought Along a Photographer
I actually didn’t bring a photographer. My wife joined us for one leg of the flight, but she did take pictures, so I suppose that does make her a photographer. We had kids and grandkids in town for a week, and then some of them went to Oxnard to spend some more time at the […]
IFR Training – Back in the Saddle
After a month without any IFR training I finally got back in the air. The plane was down three and a half weeks for the GFC500 Autopilot installation and then there was a weekend trip to St. George for a family reunion. I used the autopilot for the flight there and back and it was […]
IFR Training – Breakthrough
Training flights 13 and 14 took place Wednesday April 28th and Saturday May 1st. Initially my plane was supposed to go into the shop April 26th for the GFC500 Autopilot to be installed, but the shop was backed up and wouldn’t get to it until the following Monday, so I kept the plane and planned […]
IFR Training – Round Robin – Take Two and Three
IFR training flight 11 was to take place in the evening on the 14th. I was doing pre-flight on the plane and heard some police sirens but didn’t think anything of it. However, after a few minutes went by without hearing any planes coming or going I walked out in front of my hangar, and […]
IFR Training – Flights 9 & 10 – New Challenges
IFR Training flights 9 and 10 took place the evenings of April 7th and 9th. The two flights presented some new challenges. Flight 9 – April 7th Wednesday we filed IFR flight plans from Fullerton (KFUL) to French Valley (F70) and back. We filed TEC (Tower En Route Control) routes to make things easier for […]
IFR Training – Filing and Flying IFR
Flights 7 and 8 took place the evenings of March 17th and 19th. It is time to take the next step and actually file an IFR plan, pick up the clearance, and fly it. The plan Wednesday evening was to file and fly to San Bernardino and land instead of flying the missed approach. After […]
IFR Training – Small Improvements
I had flights scheduled for Wednesday and Friday evenings but In conversations with my CFII we scrubbed both of them for weather. That may sound strange, cancelling Instrument Flight Rules training because of weather, but let me explain. Wednesday there were storms off and on throughout the day. There was a convective outlook which means […]
IFR Training – “Great kid. Don’t Get Cocky.”
My recollection is that the first movie I ever saw in a theater was the first Star Wars. Not the terrible prequel with too much CGI and one of the most annoying characters brought into the Sci-Fi universe, but the one released in 1977, where Mark Hamill plays a young Luke Skywalker who goes from […]
IFR Training – Approach to LPV Minimums
Most of Wednesday was rainy and overcast, but the day to actually fly through the clouds was not to be yet. I met up with my CFII after work for another evening training flight. By the time we met the ceilings in the area were between 4,500-5,000′. He said that he had considered filing an […]
IFR Training – Flights 2 & 3
Flight Two – Wednesday 02/24/2021 Wednesday after work I met my CFII at the airport again for round two of my training. I had spent the past days since my last flight reviewing all the things that I did wrong. The biggest one was fixating on one instrument or in the case of the top […]
IFR Training – Chasing the Plane
IFR, Instrument Flight Rules, flying solely by reference to instruments, is most often associated with flying in the clouds but could also be flying at night over water or over sparsely populated areas where you have no ground reference. I have wanted to obtain my instrument rating for awhile but was waiting until I had […]
