We had an enormous amount of fried food at our house yesterday
along with Joe, Jacob and Phil. I think the mozzarella sticks
were pretty good, even if they did end up leaking all over Joe's
shirt.
Also an important safety tip for our viewers: Jacob is from here
on out not allowed to have access to the tivo controller while
there are many people trying to enjoy important sports activity on
television.
<boc> What? It was just a two point conversion.
Before the game I had another instrument lesson out at Bedford. This time
I actually wrote up a flight plan, filed and picked up my
clearance at the airport and had to wait for release. It's kind
of fun to see the system working from the planning standpoint.
It's reasonably simple. I don't really like the idea that you
have to go back and forth and potentially negotiate for a specific
route to where you want to go, but I can understand why they do
it. It just makes it harder to plan fuel and time.
We flew up to Concord and did a
couple of practice approaches there (the ILS 35 and VOR
12 approach.) I did pretty well on the ILS approach. No big
problems there and would have probably landed fine. On the VOR
approach I missed timing at a couple of points, but I probably
would have been OK as well. I just need to remember to use my 5
Ts every time.
We flew down to Bedford and did the GPS 23 approach into there.
That was the very first GPS approach that I've done and
holycowisiteasy. The GPS gives you the azimuth information you
need as well as giving you plenty of warning on the turns you have
to make, the distance to the next waypoint and lots of other good
information. I can understand why this is the last approach that
we did together because everything else would have seemed
impossible by comparison. All in all, a pretty easy appraoch.
For my next lesson, John suggested that I start thinking about the
long cross-country that's required by the regulations. I'm not
sure I'm ready for that, but it's good to know that my training is
coming along as fast as it is. Scanning seems pretty solid now as
does aircraft control. Not perfect of course, but good enough so
I don't have to think about it all the time and can concentrate on
communicating and actually flying the route I'm supposed to be
flying.
