Now that my solo cross country flights are out of the way, I’m ready to get the 1.2 remaining instrument hours finished. We had an evening flight, though still during daylight, so it wouldn’t be quite as hot as usual. I was in 333 as 40B was still awaiting its engine mount. 89333 has a digital VOR radio that is both nice and not so nice at the same time. Its three modes make it easy to read the current radial from a given VOR, and its standby mode makes it easy to switch back and forth between two VORs, but at times it seems to have trouble settling down. One second it’ll read one thing, and a couple seconds later it’ll be 10-20° different. It worked fine for me on the way to Florence, but I’ve seen it act up so I wanted to get some more experience with it under the hood.
Just after takeoff, I put the hood on. Gene would give me instructions on headings and altitudes to go to and hold, and I would comply. Instrument flying isn’t particularly hard, but it does require ignoring what your body is telling you and trusting what the plane is telling you. We worked on intercepting and tracking VOR radials, climbs, descents, slow flight and even steep turns, all under the hood. I think it was easier to do the steep turns while staring at the instruments, but that’s not what VFR flying is about. It’s good to know I can do it if I need to in an emergency IMC situation.
After 0.5 hours of instrument work, it was time to head back. Gene had me make some small corrections of headings and altitude, then asked me to descend at 500fpm. Then he made a call that we were coming straight in on runway 21. Trying to squeeze an extra tenth of instrument time out of the flight, I continued to descend with me under the hood. I wasn’t sure how close we were, though, and by the time I took the hood off at the 0.6 hour, we were half a mile from the threshold but a little too high. Nothing a forward slip wouldn’t take care of.
We only flew for 0.9 hours total, but working under the hood always feels like longer.
I’m now at 67.0 total hours and only 0.6 hours of instrument work remain.