IFR checkride: passed

About a year after I started the initial training I finally passed my
checkride last week. The cross country hours took me forever to build
up. I finished that off with a nice flight from Hawthorne, CA to
Oakland to see the Dodgers play across the bay.

The oral went perfectly, it was only about 90 minutes and half of that
was the examiner telling me war stories. Pretty incredible guy--flew
Hueys and Cobras in Vietnam, test pilot for Gulfstream, and now captain
of one of Toyota's brand new G5's. Nice life. The weather was poor so
we decided to fly the next day.

The flight was tower en route from KHHR to Van Nuys for the VOR-A
approach, circle to land. Unfortunately as I was approaching CANOG
intersection the turn coordinator started failing for real. I
mentioned this to the DE and he said "you have bigger problems than
that." I looked and sure enough, I let myself get distracted and flew
through the fix without starting my descent. I recovered ok though, we
did a touch and go, then did a hold at TWINE intersection with a
parallel entry. Then 2 unusual attitudes, and onto Burbank (KBUR) ILS
partial panel. No problem at all.

The DE took over for a bit and flew us to the Compton NDB for a partial
panel NDB approach. That was extremely difficult for me since by then
the turn coordinator was completely done-in. Compton doesn't actually
have an instrument approach of course but you have to fly a procedure
turn per the PTS at some point, and SoCal Approach never lets you do
one. So he had me fly the old Columbia CA NDB approach, substituting
the Compton NDB. I didn't hold the course particuarly well but I
finally finished and the DE was nice enough to take the plane from
there back home. I was exhausted. I flew pretty poorly by my own
standards but good enough to pass, so I'm happy. Total flight was 1.8
hours.

Total time 144 hrs, 31.6 simulated IFR, 1.0 actual, 11.1 ground trainer.

Congrats. Now work at keeping current, legal & proficient. Not the same
things. I have a CFII friend in Arizona who has a mere 4 hours of actual.
I get more than that in good month. I guess when the clouds have teeth, you
stay out.

I subscribe to "IFR." Pricey but a lot of worthwhile info.

Again, congratulations.
--

Thx, {|;-)

Victor J. (Jim) Osborne, Jr.

wrote in message
oups.com...

About a year after I started the initial training I finally passed my
checkride last week.

On Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:37:35 -0400, Victor J. Osborne, Jr. wrote:
I have a CFII friend in Arizona who has a mere 4 hours of actual.
I get more than that in good month.

They have clouds in AZ?????? Four hours sounds excessive *big smile*.

I guess when the clouds have teeth, you
stay out.

Especially during AZ Monsoon season!

Allen

Victor wrote:

I have a CFII friend in Arizona who has a mere 4 hours of actual.

I met a CFII at our flight school in the Northeast US who came up from
Arizona. She had *no* actual IMC time.

--
Peter

Chris wrote :

I was exhausted. I flew pretty poorly by my own
standards but good enough to pass, so I'm happy. Total flight was 1.8
hours.


Congratulations, Chris. I never thought I would have a greater sense
of accomplishment than passing the private pilot checkride; that is,
until passing the instrument checkride.

Stay safe and stay current!

--
Peter

Chris wrote :

I was exhausted. I flew pretty poorly by my own
standards but good enough to pass, so I'm happy. Total flight was 1.8
hours.


Congratulations, Chris. I never thought I would have a greater sense
of accomplishment than passing the private pilot checkride; that is,
until passing the instrument checkride.

Stay safe and stay current!

--
Peter

Peter R. wrote:
Victor wrote:


I have a CFII friend in Arizona who has a mere 4 hours of actual.


I met a CFII at our flight school in the Northeast US who came up from
Arizona. She had *no* actual IMC time.

http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/GenPDF.asp?...04FA107&rpt=fa

"...the pilot informed approach control that he did not have weather like this
in Arizona...

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

Congrats Chris,

I took my ride with a retired TWA captain last year who was from Wilton, CT
and did 2 approaches into OXC and one into BDR after takeoff from BDR.

He told me I passed in the air...only took me 10 years to finish it...LOL



Greg

PP-ASEL-IA

wrote in message
ups.com...
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