This evening, shortly before sundown, the FAA’s desginated professional examiner turned to me as we taxied back after our last landing and said, “Congratulations, you’re an instrument pilot”.
More later, but that’s some of the news today.
Now that the directional gyro works it is time to get moving again with this IFR rating. It’s been over three weeks since my checkride (part I: the oral exam). So instructor M and I scheduled a ride and did some local approaches, probably some of the approaches that I’ll have on my checkride.
I was pleased that I tracked altitude, heading, and the ILS much better than I expected I would. Especially the glideslope and localizer tracking was good. My problems were, however, in procedures and planning ahead. In short the “doing” part of things is going well.
I seem to have problems with planning for the next thing or two that I will need to do. I messed up the entrance to the hold because of this, didn’t brief the approaches as well as I should have, and almost made a wrong turn on one approach. The “thinking” part of IFR flying is where I’m rusty. That turn would have been a checkride bust.
M said, “You’ll never to do that again.”. And he’s right. He also thinks I’m ready for the checkride, but I want one more flight with him first to ensure I’ve got the IFR thinking part going well. Some parts of flying are mostly mechanical skill in moving the controls correctly. But IFR has a large thinking component to it. I have to maintain a mental model of where I am in relation to the approach, airport, or course I’m holding, and more broadly, to the situation I’m in. Maintenance of that mental model is where I’m a bit rusty.
So next is some practice at home (in the home “sim”), and another flight with instructor M. Then, scheduling permitting, the actual checkride.
The directional gyro was replaced in the plane today. This evening, after a rather more careful pre-flight inspection than usual, I took off and checked the DG out in flight. In short, it works.
The DG’s heading wandered a bit when the plane was a idle or taxi. But that’s normal, there’s not enough vacuum to spin it up fully then. But it self-erected properly and promptly.
After takeoff I flew headings in a big triangle at cruise to verify that the compass and the DG (when set correctly) agreed with each other. I was concerned for a while because they were about 10 degrees different. But at cruise in this plane, the compass vibrates. When it does, it goes off heading due to resonance. When I hold it still with my non-magnetic finger, its heading is valid. And it and the gyro agrees then too.
I tried some turns around a point, the DG moved smoothly and evenly in both directions. When I adjust the heading bug, the DG doesn’t “drift” as it was before. Time to go back home.
Naturally, there’s a plane on a long straight in approach for the runway. Everyone else was doing the normal 45 degree approach to downwind, so the guy on straight in was cutting across our path. But we all worked it out and I had a nice smooth landing. It was a landing that made me feel like a super pilot. But no matter, I know I’ll have another landing sometime soon that’ll keep me humble.
Our plane is back in service.
It is sitting quietly beside me in its padded box right now. Turns out the instrument was defective. There was no installation error in the plane. As aviation mechanics don’t work on weekends, Monday is the soonest chance for re-installation. Then, I’ll do a check flight where I get to be a test pilot and verify it works when reinstalled in the working airplane.
I don’t feel much in common with Scott Crossfield or Chuck Yeager though. This will be a perfectly normal VFR (visual) flight. I’ll just also be checking that the directional gyro:
I’ll check it against the magnetic compass. After all, the directional gyro was once called a gyroscopic compass.
Then, I get to fly with my instructor a time or two, and reschedule my checkride.
