Chris,
Congratulations. We got our instrument ratings 3 weeks ago. With
frequent thunderstorms, we were only able to go up for practices 4
times. Last Sunday, we filed an IFR flight plan for a short 50nm trip.
We chose the flight level high enough to be in the cloud. The HFD
airport was pretty close to a C airspace, BDL so there was a lot of
vectoring. It took us 1.3hrs vs. the typical direct .7hr . The trade
off was that the PIC, my husband, Rick, got to log .5hr actual.
Everything went smoothly until we were cleared for the LDA rwy2
approach and was told to contact the tower. Rick was descending to
2200 from 2500 and made the mistake of pushing the PTT switch before
leveling. The exchange with the tower took a bit longer than expected
to explain our intention of doing a low approach then heading to 4B8
(our intended final destination) instead of landing. I looked at the
altimeter and was alarmed to see that we were at 2000' before reaching
the LOM. Rick had to scramble to go up 200' then within a minute had
to go drop down quickly to get to the MDA of 640. During our training
our instructor strongly reemphasized the order of aviate and navigate
before communinate, but it was just so easy to push the darn PTT button
when one was told to contact the next frequency.
I'm starting to a page on our instrument training notebook
documenting the lessons learned. Just hope that the entries will get
spaced out further and further and eventually stop ;-)
Hai Longworth