Today’s flight was a potpourri of basic instrument flying, yes I said potpourri. Rather than start something new, Nick decided that it would be best if we went up and practiced everything in one flight to prepare me for my IFR Stage 1 check flight. With this in mind, I donned the hood and we covered topics such as…
- Basic Attitude Instrument Flying (BAIF)
- Power-Off & Power-On Stalls
- Steep Turns
- Constant Rate and Speed Descents
- VOR Intercepts
- Intercepts with Partial Panel
- Unusual Attitude with Partial Panel
- Localizer Interception
It was sort of strange up there today. We arrived at the practice area and dialed in the Approach frequency only to find it eerily silent. This was so unusual that for a moment we thought we had a comm failure. Nick told the controller that would be practicing in the area, and asked for traffic advisories, to which the controller happily agreed to provide. We flew around the practice area for about 15 to 20 minutes in mostly silence, but all of a sudden the frequency (and the Zaon MRX) lit up and we were avoiding traffic left and right. The controller who minutes ago had plenty of bandwidth, was now busy dealing with a jammed frequency and asking new aircraft to call back in a few minutes. It was like when you go to the store and on your way in past the cash register there is nobody in line, but by the time you’ve picked up what you need and headed to headed to the front to check-out, a long line of people has now formed, and you get that, “Where did all these people suddenly come from?” feeling.
Just before the peak of activity we had asked for the ILS into Livermore and the controller had begun to issue us vectors to intercept the localizer. However, as it got increasingly busy it was obvious that he was looking to offload some of his workload so he basically shortcut us to the FOOTO intersection, and told us to contact Livermore tower. Oh well, so much for that.
Despite the chaos of the heavy traffic, it went very well overall and Nick is pleased with my progress and performance. I don’t yet know when my stage check will be, and I am told we will now be spending an hour or two on the ground talking about approach procedures.
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