Flying IFR - Lesson 11 - More And New Approaches, Plus Being Ignored By Detroit Approach

For Lesson 11, I had Reese as my instructor as Kevin was off on a King Air charter.

Reese was rather nice and knew his stuff.

The plan was for a very task-loaded lesson: Kevin had told him, and sent me a note last night that we would do:  Y47 VOR-A full procedure circle and miss; KYIP RNAV 23R full procedure from SVM VOTRAC; KVLL RNAV 9 cir. 27 and land; KPTK Loc BC 27L partial panel.

This would be my first time going to either Y47 or KYIP so that would be fun.

So I reviewed the associated plates and prepared for the lesson.

I had a good pre-flight brief with Reese where I went over what I had prepared and I got a few questions answered, and then I did the preflight and started up.  He had filed an IFR flight plan, even though we would likely stay VFR the entire time, but that would come in handy later.

Right off the bat things got interesting.  The big runway at Pontiac is closed for construction so everyone is using 27R.  We now do the run up at the ramp before calling ground as a matter of course.  As you might expect, being down to one runway caused some congestion.

We finally got a takeoff clearance and I took off and followed instructions to contact Detroit Approach.  We then got vectored to the Y47 GPS-A approach as the VOR-A was not available for Detroit to give us, and that worked out ok.  Overlal pretty good, the airport is ridiculously hard to find and you see the hangars long before you see the small and very narrow runway.  Managed to finally find it, corcled in and did a missed approach.

Then off to KYIP, Ypsilanti for the 5R as the 23R was not being used due to the wind.  I did that one ok, and we did another missed.

Then to KVLL and while we planned a circle to land for 27, the wind was for Runway 9 as it was blowing from 110 degrees, so I went in and I did a short field landing there and then a takeoff from Runway 27 as the wind shifted just as I landed to 300.

Then we took off and maintained runway heading and called Detroit Approach.

Nada.

Called again, still nada.

Flew a bit more and listened to them ignore 88J  completely, and listened while Approach was talking to some business jets.

Called them again and got a heading, but then didn't hear back form them for a very long time. We ended up on that headin way out of the way south and west  of the approach back to KPTK.  In short they either forgot about us or decided to ignore us for a bit.

We flew that for quite awhile and then they finally remembered us - asking again what approach we were wanting to do - and finally got vectored back to the approach. We flew East to catch the Kuhna waypoint and then turned north to get to the Initial Approach Fix. They out and out refused 88J's request to fly the approach, so 88J did it VFR anyways which was kinda funny.

I then flew the approach and it went rather well, doing a sidestep to Runway 27R.

I'm still feeling pretty behind and need to work on my radio communications a bit.  Biggest problem is tracking courses while doing everything else.  Reese noted I'm doing the complicated things right and planning ahead and setting things up properly but as I do that,  I tend to stray off course (especially as there was quite a bit of wind and chop up there)  and I need to work on that.

Overall a very good lesson and I learned quite a bit.

That's 1.9 with 1.6 Simulated Instrument and 2 landings.