IFR Lesson 1
My instructor, who I’ll call M, and I worked on the simulator. Technically it’s not a simulator but an “FTD” or flight training device as it doesn’t fully simulate flight. But it’s useful to teach basics more cheaply and easily than in an airplane. We’ll use this a number of times throughout training to learn various new aspects. I can count up to 10 hours of its use to my hours accumulated for the instrument rating.
We started with straight-and-level flight on the gauges. I practiced my “scan”, looking successively at each of the main “6-pack” of gauges: altitude indicator, airspeed, altitude, heading, turn coordinator, and vertical speed indicator (VSI). Each gauge tells me somewhat different information. And each has a different set of possible errors. Pitch or heading information is shared across multiple gauges.
My job is to take in all this information from the various gauges, integrate it into a idea of what the airplane (or simulator) is doing, then compare that with what I want it to do, and move the controls to either keep it doing that, or make it do what I want.
Like learning to ride a bike, initially it takes all my attention to make this work. With time, it’ll get more automatic and I’ll be able to do other things; like tune and talk on the radio, adjust the GPS, etc.
I did well M told me. I was able to maintain heading and altitude reasonably closely, although not quite to IFR checkride standards yet.
While we started with straight-and-level, we ended up doing turns (while maintaining altitude), climbs, and descents at a constant airspeed, and then turns while climbing or descending. M introduced some training patterns to fly with timed legs; a square and a double racetrack (side by side).
So, a good start!