IFR Practice Lesson Learned

Today I learned a lesson about practicing IFR flight. I was practicing
with another member of our flying club who is a private pilot, but not
instrument rated, coming back from Rogers, AR to Fort Smith after a
pancake breakfast fly-in. Fort Smith was landing 7. My safety pilot
wanted to fly just the landing at FSM, so I asked for the VOR 25
approach, circle to land 7 (The VOR is NE of the field). We were
cleared as requested and told to circle north of 7/25 for a C-130 doing
touch and goes in the pattern on the south side. At MDA, a couple miles
of the MAP, I gave control to him, wanting to leave him time to get set
up. Not knowing what was expected in the circle to land to 7 clearance,
he made a turn to the north. I assumed I missed a radio call while
removing my hood and didn't say anything until tower questioned us.

The moral of the story - if your safety pilot isn't instrument rated,
make sure he knows exactly what is going on.

Matt

BTW - is this the sort of thing I should file an ASRS report for?

Matt Young wrote:
The moral of the story - if your safety pilot isn't instrument rated,
make sure he knows exactly what is going on.

Even if he *is* instrument rated, you want to make sure you're both on
the same page. I always do a pre-flight briefing with my safety pilots
to make sure we both understand what we're expecting from each other.

BTW - is this the sort of thing I should file an ASRS report for?

Filing an ASRS form never hurts. Even if you don't think you did
anything wrong per-se, it gives the system feedback about safety-related
issues.