Flying IFR - Lesson #5 - Going Actual

Today the weather was solid IFR - rainy. low clouds and winds gusting out of 040.  Normally that would be an easy call of a hard no for my go-no go decision to fly.

"We're going flying", says Kevin.

Yes, my first taste of flying in actual conditions as a licensed pilot.

Kevin had prepared and filed a flight plan, and we went over what we would do this lesson - fly to Flint, do some approaches including an ILS and an RNAV, and then fly back to Pontiac for an instrument landing using the localizer for 9R.

I preflighted N1869H in the hangar as it was raining.  Yes, N1869H again and yes the fargin' left seat keeps losing the detents, but the other plane I was set for was down for maintenance and this one was nearest the door so we went with it. I finally figured out that its two detent positions that it will always lose which include position 1 where I like to sit, so if I sit 3 settings back it will stay, but I feel a bit farther away than normal but it does work.

So it was a good preflight, good IFR preflight check and runup and then we lined up on 9L and we were off getting clearance from Ground and Tower and took off into the soup climbing to 3,000 and expecting 4,000 10 minutes after.

And soup it was.  Solid cloud and rain made for an interesting experience as your instruments are it as there's no point in looking outside - its all grey/white nothingness. Your body does start to lie to you so you have to focus on your instruments and instrument scan and keep trying to be ahead - which I gotta work on but its apparently normal for where I am in the process right now.

It's all instrument focused on getting to the required headings, trying not to overshoot, correcting for wind and  keeping at the altitude you need to be at at all times.  And change frequencies on the radio and ident the VOR you already had dialed in, and communicate with controllers.  Some nice task loading there.

So we contacted Detroit Approach and let them know where we were and they vectored us for the ILS and we then contacted Great Lakes Approach and I did the approach along with a course reversal to get onto the ILS.  Then once we werre established we descend and busted out a bit over minimums and I could see the runway right where it should be which was very cool. I did a low pass over the runway and went missed.  

Then we got vectored for the RNAV approach which went well, but they took us off course a bit to make room for other traffic.  Then following the LPV guidance I again broke out close to minimums right in line with the runway.  Intense, tasks loaded, focussed and a lot of fun.

They asked us to keep our speed up for a Royal Air jet also doing a practice approach and we did an early missed approach to get out of their way and then got handed off to Great Lakes Approach and then Detroit Approach for vectors to head back to Pontiac.

We then did the 9R localizer approach to Pontiac and again like clockwork the runway was right where it needed to be.  We did a sidestep to Runway 9L and I landed.

We did a debrief and looked at the flight tracks we made and went over the approaches and Kevin said I did quite well and am coming along nicely.  He commented that I was really paying attention and caught course deviations quickly but have a bit of a right turning tendency (It's funny how that is the case both politically and flying-wise). Some of that is due to N1689Hs yoke needing to be slightly left to be truly centered. I'll have to see if this occurs in the other planes too.

That was quite the intense flight and a really great intro to truly flying in IFR conditions.

That's 2.1 with 1.5 in Actual IMC, 3 approaches and 1 nice landing.