Paul Folbrecht wrote in
:

Hello all,

I've made the appointment for my IR checkride, although it's still a
ways out, and had a couple things on my mind.

1) Concerning the heading standards (+- 10 degrees, of course), I find
that I still, at this point, _occasionally_ exceed them, _especially_ in
prepping for an approach (though I have a yoke-mounted clip for my
plates I still find my scan degrading a bit when I'm prepping & setting
up). So, that's occasionally, not _consistently_, getting off-heading
by more than 10d (probably 20d at the most). How picky are most
examiners about this type of thing? I know that the PTS states that
"consistent" exceeding of the standards is grounds for failure, so I
rather hope that me getting off-course by, say 20d, then correcting
immediatly, isn't going to have a huge impact. But who knows. Perhaps
my skills are still not quite up to snuff. BTW I have about 33h total
instrument time now, about 8 of which is in a FTD.

How much off course you get not only depends on the heading deviations, but
also on how much time you remain on the wrong heading. Letting your heading
drift occasionally while doing other tasks is not all that unusual. As long
as you catch the error and correct it promptly, I don't think this would be
a big deal.




2) I also seem to have a devil of a time passing DIRECTLY OVER a VOR
(when I say "VOR" of course I mean "VOR or "VORTAC", etc.), for instance
when flying a full approach and the navaid is the IAF I'm using. My
instructor tells me that I ought to fly so directly over that thing that
the CDI is perfectly centered and then immediately flips from "to" to
"from" on passage, with only an instant of the flag. What I tend to do
is be off by just a bit, getting full-deflection on the CDI (for a
second or two) before the flip. He correctly points out that the
standards call out 3/4 deflection as max deflection, and there seems to
be nothing to account for this type of thing. So, is this (passing
directly, I mean directly, over the navaid) a skill that I really should
have down by the time of the checkride? Just looking for a 2nd (and
possibly 3rd-150th) opinion here.

If you are getting full CDI deflection for only one or two seconds before
the flip, then you are doing fine. What you want to avoid is the CDI
staying that way for longer than, say, about 10 seconds.