First time in actual IFR conditions

Today I woke up to find that the ceiling at JGG was at 800ft and that the weather around the general area was all IFR.

I called Charles to see what the plan should be and he told me to come on out and that, if the ceiling hit 1000ft, we'd go get some actual instrument time in.

I went out to the airport and after preflighting we chatted for a bit in the office. He quizzed me on filing alternate airport destinations (when the weather requires it) and what the value of filing an alternate is (the primary one being that ATC has a good idea where you might head in bad weather if you lose communications).

Charles then mentioned that he wouldn't throw any curve balls at me on this flight, since going into the "soup" for the first time would be enough for me to manage. He then said that if an emergency happened in flight that he'd let me do whatever I felt made sense, until I started to do something wrong. He's never actually said that aloud before. :)

The weather finally lifted a little bit - just enough for us to go. We taxied out and used the ground communcations outlet at JGG to call up Norfolk approach.

Four clicks on the mic and the phone at the airport dials Norfolk Approach for us. "Norfolk, this is 5199A on the ground in Williamsburg requesting IFR clearance". The controller needed a few minutes (he was busy with someone else) - then we received our clearance: "cleared to HCM vortac then to Newport News as filed, 3,000 ft altitude, departure on 125.7, squawk 5344". After I read it back to him we were ready to go. A little double check of the radio settings and we were picking up speed down runway 31 - lift off.

We followed the noise abatement departure procedure by turning due west at 400' AGL. Then I called up Norfolk: "Norfolk Approach, Cessna 5199A is with you at 700 for 3000". We heard what sounded like a static-y reply so after I gained a few more hundred feet I called them again, and turned toward the HCM vortac. This time we raised them and ident'ed as requested.

They found us on radar and vectored us to a heading of 090. We made the right hand turn and I went into my first cloud. It was much more disorienting than I had thought it might be. Seeing stuff rush by the airplane at 80kts (climb speed) in my peripheral vision was a new thing to me.

I concentrated on my instruments, as I have practiced for all of my flights this year. Every so often I would catch myself in a little turn that I didn't realize I was in, but they were brief and my instrument scan pointed them out quickly.

A few hundred feet up we broke through the layer, at around 1700'. Blue skies all around - especially striking to me since I had been staring at grey clouds all morning. Now I was over them and the air was smooth.

The controller was vectoring us over toward the York river so we could do the GPS 20 approach at PHF (Newport News). We crossed the large Coleman bridge that goes between Newport News and Gloucester. This put us just north of the RACOT waypoint. The approach typically starts to the north at PANLE but we think the controller was trying to get us into the airport and out to make room for a large jet coming in from the NE.

We were cleared for the GPS 20 approach right on the approach course and told to contact the tower.
Since we were at 3000' and only a few miles from the runway we had to lose some altitude quick (when controllers set you up like this and you have to dump a lot of altitude quickly pilots sometimes call it a "slam dunk"). It was no problem though, we contacted the tower at Newport News and starting a nice 700 foot/min descent while tracking the approach course.

When we reached ROBOY we descended down to the minimums for the approach and looked up to see the runway right in front of us. When we hit the missed approach point at the end of the runway we turned to 250 and started climbing to 3000. We went back into the clouds briefly between 1100' and 1900'.

We were told to go directly to HCM vortac again and to let the controller know when we were ready to shoot the approach into West Point. After briefing the approach we let ATC know we were ready for it. They told us we were cleared for the VOR-A approach into West Point and to cross HCM at or above 2000'. I started my descent.

We entered the hold for the VOR-A approach and started down to 1700' feet. When we turned inbound towards the airport we heard another airplane transmitting to West Point. They were about 3000' above us and coming into West Point. We had no idea how they were planning to do that legally without an IFR flight plan because the weather was still a bit socked in.

We started looking for the traffic, as best we could, but never did see them. When we reached the airport we started our right hand turn back to HCM for the missed approach procedure. Charles let the traffic know what we were up to and I started the climb to 3000' as ATC had previously instructed us to do.

I called up Norfolk approach again and found that they were pretty busy. They didn't reply at first so we climbed a little more and called them again. They came back with a traffic adivsory of another plane 500' below us a 0.5 miles away. Needless to say that meant they were close by so we started looking and I made sure we were in a good climb. We never did see them - there were clouds below us so they may have been hidden within them.

When we got back to HCM we were cleared for the GPS-B approach into JGG just after we crossed the turning point for that approach. That approach went reasonably well and we crossed the field at JGG to enter a left hand pattern to land back on 31. There was a chopper that had just left JGG and we spotted them just south of the field cruising along the shore of the James river (maybe they were on a photo run?).

All in all it was a good flight. I had a few instances of gaining a little extra altitude and not exactly nailing the VOR/GPS needle but considering that I was absorbing the new sight of clouds rushing by I can't be too disappointed with myself. :)

Flying through conditions like we experienced today is the whole reason I am training for my IFR ticket and it was great to finally go through "real" weather.