First, let me say thank you to everyone who congratulated me!

For those that said that the Instrument is supposed to be harder than the
Private, I would probably say that for me it was probably not so much
harder, but it presented a very different set of challenges than the
Private. Quite frankly, I can see where a VFR pilot, having just gotten his
ticket, might have a lot of trouble jumping into the IFR training. But I
started my IFR training when I went for my first BFR. So I had been flying
for 2 years VFR, and had about 200 hours. Most of my flying has been to
make sales and service calls to my computer software business customers
ranging from 100NM to 300NM, generally with Flight Following.

So I had a fair amount of experience holding the plane steady, learning to
trim, and talking to ATC, and letting a lot of this become "second nature".
These are some very important IFR flight skills, and by having the
experience I had, I was able to get a "head start" on the training. It also
gave me the ability to have some fun flying with my eyes out the window for
a while before I got under the hood.

Another factor for me was my motivation. Cancelling for weather when it was
not that bad, but not comfortable for a VFR X-C made it difficult to commit
to meetings with any level of certainty. For example, I cancelled a flight
from HPN (NY) to ERI(PA) over the Pocono and Allegheny Mountains when the
ceilings were 2000'. There aren't any great weather-supplying airports in
some of the mountainous areas, and with ceilings that low, I just didn't
feel comfortable that I might not have IMC in some of the mountainous areas
in between...

Now (while there are still obviously weather issues that have to be dealt
with - like Ice & T-Storms) if it's just a could deck, I can climb up to
VFR on top and know I will be able to get down afterword or even fly
through it a while, and that is a wonderful thought.

Now I will give you some of the CheckRide Rundown, although I may skip some
of the less interesting details...

The Oral was simpler than I expected. My mind spent the morning playing
games on me - thinking about all the things that I couldn't remember. So I
was fairly nervous. The DE was friendly and fairly social, but I was still
nervous...

As we sat down, the DE covered the basics, starting with the flight
planning. He didn't really give me any big surprises at first, so I started
to build a little bit more confidence. And most of the discussion was more
social than grilling - talking about the rules, but also about the common-
sense reasons behind some of the decisions that I had or would make based
on scenarios. And of course in many cases talking about the big picture
helped demonstrate that I understood, for example, how systems worked even
in the discussion of flight planning and weather.

As I started to get comfortable, though, he did start to push a bit with a
couple of interesting questions that he admitted later he didn't expect me
to know answers to. The one that surprised me the most was "Say you let
your currency lapse, and now it's a year later and you want to get an IPC.
How would you know what you have to show the instructor in order to get
signed off?"

Of course, I thought it was in the same FAR that talked about currency and
the IPC in the first place. Interestingly enough, that wasn't even close. I
am going to save the answer for those people who want to work it out on
their own... Although after thinking about it, it's not nearly as
surprising an answer now that I know where to find it!

So then I go preflight the plane and we get ready to go. When I had flown
in to see him, the wind was fairly calm. But by the time we started out,
the wind had actually picked up a bit, and changed direction fairly
significantly on our flight path.

I have to say, it was pretty route, and not very surprising. He played
Clearance-Delivery, which admittedly threw me off just a hair... Then we
took off and started with some basic VOR tracking and navigation. He had my
fly to HTO, the IAF on the VOR approach to the airport of the same name
(East Hampton). The wind picked up a bit and changed direction on me, so I
kinda blew the correction in the hold/procedure turn (nerves didn't help me
much either). I'm not sure if I was asleep at the wheel or if the wind was
just squirrely, but basically the inbound leg was not existent and I ended
up falling behind it a bit and missing the FAF for about 10-15 seconds and
was still not properly corrected. I was pretty embarassed at how poorly I
was handling it.
I did the Missed Approach, and dealt with it, but now I was even more
nervous because I felt that my performance was worse than anything I had
done since early training. I thought I was failing.

So we flew back to the other airport, and I was having a little bit of
trouble tracking on the way back between the squirrely winds and my
increased tension and nerves now. At one point he made a comment about it,
which in hindsight was probably just meant to help me, but made me even
more sure I was failing. Then he vectored me to West, and asked me to do
the steep turns. I must say, I thought I did those fairly flawlessly, and
that gave me a bit of confidence back. Then he covered the AI and DG, and
we started back. He asked me to do the VOR approach into HWV, and somehow I
couldn't find the plate - it must have fallen out or something. Back comes
all the nervous tension...

So he saw that the plate I had on the top of the deck was the GPS approach,
and said let's just do that one, starting at one of the intersections. So I
programmed it in, and the GPS starts acting weird. What I realized later
was that when he asked me to start the approach (or by the time I selected
it in, anyway) we were basically right across that intersection, so the GPS
flipped me back around. I was starting to freak out and screw around with
the OBS until I figured out what was going on. And started to feel worse
again.

Then I flew the approach. I flew that one fairly well, and then shot the
missed. Then he took off the covers, and we went back for the ILS to
landing. But all of a sudden the pattern got really busy...

So he had me use Pattern Altitude as my MDA and that was a little bit
unusual, but I dealt with it. To be honest, it made it feel like it wasn't
a complete approach, and I figured he did it because he already knew he was
failing me anyway.

We went into his office and I apologized for my poor performance. I
described to him what I knew that I did wrong - from the things I noted
above, to not checking for weather before shooting the approaches, and
omitting a couple of radio calls. He pointed out that there were a few
things that I handled fairly well that he's seen other students and
applicants just "lose it" and give up. He said I handled the mistake on the
first approach properly, and even commended for catching the GPS thing
because he said even he wasn't quite sure where we were when he cleared me
and so it was kinda tricky. He reminded me that in real life, I would have
been way out and setting up and it would have been a nonissue.

So I walked away with a new rating.

And the next day I flew to Wings for a sales call in beautiful CAVU
weather! And even though I could have flown VFR, I filed and even got to
fly through a cloud! What a rush!!!



"Jim" wrote in :

CONGRATS!!! How about a run down on the check ride?