IFR current for another 6 months

Today Tom and I hopped into his airplane to make the short hop over to PHF from JGG. The plan was to grab 99A out at PHF so that I could fly some approaches it in. Flying over in Tom's plane let us avoid rush hour on the interstate and let Tom get some approaches in while I watched out for traffic going into Camp Perry and West Point and other various and sundry runway destinations.

We managed to pick yet another severe clear day for the flights though had to deal with the wrath of unstable air giving us the occasional jolt of turbulence.

Tom did the ILS 25 approach into PHF and made it a full stop landing. While he was tying the airplane down I ran into Mercury Aviation to get the logbook and keys to 99A. Tom joined me at 99A mid-preflight as I was discovering that the left flap was a little sticky. It seemed to deploy fully but was unhappy about it. I decided I’d just fly without the use of flaps today – not a big deal since the gusty winds would keep me from using more than 10 degrees of flaps anyway. Soon we were leaving runway 20 to get in 3 practice IFR approaches.

I did a GPS-A approach into FYJ, making a bit of use of the autopilot during the enroute phase. I managed to remember to set OBS mode on the GPS to prevent it from auto-sequencing the waypoint when I entered the hold over HARCUM VORTAC.

From there was the VOR-B into JGG, where the GPS track image above shows I did an especially stellar job of tracking the VOR 188 radial from HARCUM (JGG is at the top of the image). Ugh. I also had a high airspeed through the approach but a headwind helped me reach the missed approach point (midfield over the runway) within 10 seconds of the correct time. That was just dumb luck.

So after that less-than-perfect approach Tom gave me vectors to the Coleman Bridge. When we reached it I picked up the ATIS at PHF and then called Norfolk on 125.7 to ask for a practice ILS 25 back into PHF, just like Tom had done an hour before. They were accommodating as usual and soon I was doing a bounced landing on the runway (I didn’t feel too bad since the winds were quite gusty and “variable”).

After shutdown we hopped back into Tom’s airplane to let him get another 2 approaches in, the FYJ and JGG ones. He did a nice circle-to-land to runway 31 and had to put a little power at last minute to let us float over a deer on the approach end.

So we had a good bit of fun, I learned a good bit, and I’m once again current to fly IFR for the next 6 months.

Things I (re)learned today:
  • 99A’s autopilot does only a fair job of a coupled ILS approach
  • Always double check that you are on the correct frequency before making a radio call
  • A GPSMap 296 mounted on the right side of the yoke makes for strong aileron trim
  • You actually have to work the rudder – even when a 2 axis autopilot is flying for you. Imagine that.

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