A Nice Day For An Instrument Currency Flight

Flying like shooting. It is a perishable skill. Instrument flying even more so.

Instrument currency can also be a pain to maintain as it is like herding cats to find a safety pilot sometimes, and you need  a safety pilot for those practice approaches to count.

So I got up early this morning and headed to the airport to meet Scott who I had convinced to be my safety pilot.

It was a beautiful sunny day to fly, if a tad windy, with gusting winds at 10 knots from 100 degrees.

 After the preflight and adding some oil, we got ready to go.

 I got flight following and let then tower know I would be doing practice approaches and they got me all setup.

 A nice takeoff and tower had me initially turn on course for Flint and then changed their mind and had me go due north for traffic and then handed me over to Detroit Approach, who almost immediately handed me over to great Lakes Approach. 

This led to lots of good practice switching frequencies quickly with the new Garmin 650XI GPS unit.  We have just replaced the 23-year-old GPS 430Ws units that were in the planes with nice new 650XIs.

We went from this:

 to this:

 

 

Some serious improvements in 23 years, including a touchscreen, better integration with the autopilot, much easier entry of Arrival and Departure Procedures and T-Routes, and a much more intuitive process -- that does take some training and study to get used to and take advantage of to use it safely.

I had studied and used a simulator of 650XI, and had used it for a VFR flight, and this would be my first time using it for IFR approaches. 

So we headed to Flint and I put the foggles on, and we started doing approaches. Unfortunately Flint's main runway is closed so no ILS approaches were available, and it would be an RNAV day.

The first approach quite frankly sucked. 

The controller dumped us to join  the approach right on top of the Final Approach Fix for the RNAV 36 at 3,500 feet and it was chop, drop ,and try to get on glideslope and glidepath time.  The plan was to make it a missed approach even if it was good. This one truly was not and was blown from the start and was missed pretty much as soon as it began.

Went missed, climbed out, got a little bouncy at 2,500 feet in light chop from the wind shifting all around, and tried again and had a much better result and the controller had us vectored in form a much more doable distance from the final approach fix rather than past it. .

Then tried it with the 650 and Autopilot flying the vectors and then the approach to the final approach fix and that went well as I manually adjusted the altitude as we reached the waypoints.  Then hand flew it in the rest of the way. Then did it one more time.

After that it was back to Pontiac for two more approaches. 

The last approach I hand flew and was right on track on the glidepath and glideslope both, even with the crosswind. Landed it like butter and it was a great finish to some very focused practice, and I'm now instrument current again.

That's 1.9, 6 approaches, and 1 great landing.