IFR 20: Stage Check - Constructive Distraction
First, congratulation to Plastic Pilot for his multiengine instrument check that he passed successfully. I’m hoping I have an instrument check flight success to report too!
But right now, I’m still working through the lessons with instructors R and M. Today it was instructor R and I who did the stage check for the approaches stage together. An ILS, a VOR approach, and a GPS approach are today’s agenda. We’ll track a victor airway to EMI VOR, then make the ILS approach to Fredrick MD, go missed, then do the VOR approach. After that back home on the GPS.
The enroute portion (as short as it is) goes fine, events are happening slowly enough that all goes well. I’m getting more facile at using my GPS for routes and IFR work. R quizzes me about engine RPMs for various airspeeds and descend rates. The idea he’s reminding me of is that I sent power, set pitch (attitude) and I get the performance I want. He also reminds me that accuracy is a mindset. I need to decide I want to be on altitude, on heading, on airspeed, and on the centerline when landing. “Be professional, don’t tolerate sloppiness.” he says.
With R playing Potomac approach I intercept the ILS from radar vectors. At first I get the glide slope nicely - the power & pitch = performance equation is working. My heading is a bit off though. I make an adjustment - turn into that direction, turn out level and check the ILS needles. Not enough. Do it again. Ok, the trend on the heading needle is good now. Check all the other instruments again. Whoops, lower flaps - forgot that earlier.
Heading’s off again (probably because I wasn’t holding wings level), do the turn to make a correction. I concentrate on the ILS needles to get that right, I’m high on the glide slope now too. I’ve spent too much time on heading. I push the nose down, geez, too much. R comments, “Don’t dive for it!”. I go back to the attitude indicator to watch my pitch. R taps the ILS needles. My heading is now off to the other side, I’ve overcorrected.
The ILS approach worked out more or less, I was never more than 3/4 needle deflection off and I found the runway, but I was always chasing the needles back and forth. The VOR approach was much the same. I’ve been thinking about my problems though. These are not terrible problems, I’m more or less where a student should be now, but I have high standards. I don’t want to just be average or typical.
David Megginson at his blog “Land and Hold Short” posted about “Flying and Concentration” today. He says, “I realized something important: it’s not concentration, but lack of concentration that makes a good pilot.” And goes on:
The thing is, when you’re flying, there are lots of things happening at once, and every one seems to need your attention all the time. You simply can’t focus on a single task and finish it. Concentrating on tuning the radio? Guess what, your altitude just changed by 200 ft. Trying to get the gyro compass set correctly? Looks like you just blew through your next checkpoint. Trying to figure out where you are on the map? Maybe you should recover from this incipient spiral, first. It’s like driving a car, but with more speed, (sometimes) nothing visible out the window, and an extra dimension and two extra axes of rotation thrown in.
He’s absolutely right. We all think that working harder means concentrating more. Not true here. My narration above shows the effects of concentrating on one thing. It means I’m ignoring something else. For some tasks, like the software engineering I do in my day job, that’s a good thing. For years now I’ve been figuring out how to concentrate more and not get distracted.
But for flying that’s a bad thing. I want to keep getting constructively distracted. I have a set of things I have to keep track of. It’s like those old acts on TV of people spinning plates. They have to keep tracking all the plates spinning on their poles and keep them all going.
At some point this will all be automatic, like when driving. It is getting there for me but isn’t fully automatic yet.
Next up: polishing up stage (making attention control more automatic), and cross-country flights. I have around 30 hours of IFR training so far of the required 40 hours.