Everything has come together and today is it...
At 7:30a I headed out to the hotel to meet my instructor, Walter, and lead
him back home into our tangled corner of town (further complicated by road
construction hell both on the main freeway and the country highway out front).
Had some confusion figuring out who Walter is but got that resolved and did the
quick drive home and got setup.
First step is some paperwork and logbook review, some of it courtesy of the
TSA. Walter is a little leery, I have only 4.6 total instrument hours out
of 300 total and all of that from private training and some basic BFR hood time.
But he feels a little better when he see's my 95 on the written and we talk a
bit about where I'm at and what I want to accomplish. What my logbook
doesn't show is several 100 hours flying various flight-sims (combat and
simulation). Although not logable and not a "real" aircraft it does
represent plenty of time translating the references supplied by the instrument
into real world position and flight attitudes, something that is one of the
basic building blocks of instrument flying.
Walter has about 5,000 hours including several years as a "freight dog" and
some time ferrying everything under the sun across the Atlantic. Walter is
actually Austrian making it to the US via Germany where he originally started
flying. For being German he's actually pretty easy going ;-).
We do our TSA paperwork including getting a copy of my passport, he gives me
my workbook and a few other handouts and we get down to business. Next
step is to drag in the procedure trainer which is a bit of a beast and get that
set up. Day one is mostly introduction and basic attitude flying and
working out our reference speeds and power settings. We do some basic
attitude flying - holding headings, taking vectors, climbing and descending.
Normally this burns a good chunk of time but Walter decides pretty quickly that
I have this down pat already and the advantage of 1 on 1 Part 61 training is you
don't have to waste time where you don't need to. We also talk a bit about
VOR and GPS/RNAV navigation and approaches. Since I have an IFR GPS Walter
decides to start with GPS/RNAV approaches. They are the most complex in
some ways because of all the messing with the GPS but they are in some ways the
easiest non-precision to fly. The needle doesn't bounce around like a lot
of CDI's do with "real" radio signals, and once setup there's no flipping of nav
stations, no course reversals, no TO/FROM confusion, etc.
Given it's going to be a warm day we decide to head to the airport and get
flying. He gets a chance to walk around the aircraft, look at the panel,
and otherwise kick tires. I'm a little nervous because SuperMouse only has
about 2 hours since coming back from maintenance on the slipped magnetos which
was only 6 hours after coming back from getting an oil filter, 500 hour mag
service and other bits.
We head out from Crystal to Maple Lake which has a VOR circling approach and
a straight-in RNAV/GPS approach. It is also the home of my planned
examiner who's scheduled for Monday July 31st (coincidentally the last day my
last flight review is valid).
