Actual approaches

Today I took my brother in law, Zack, up for a flight in a bit of weather. We had clouds from around 1,000' - 2,500' in the area so it was great IFR practice.

We shot an approach at Rutherford CO, KFQD, then pointed south to Spartanburg for an ILS approach. After Spartanburg we were directed straight back to Rock Hill, with a few vectors to get around traffic and the heaviest of the precip. XM WX was quite handy to have on hand.

I also made great use of ForeFlight Mobile HD, mainly to view approach plates, but also to keep track of our progress on the sectional display. Some of the recent changes I made (based on what I learned during my last flight with FFM) definitely helped me out. The big one was not letting the iPad sleep while FFM is running. That keeps me from worrying about the screen blanking out and having to wake it up again. As always, I picked up a few new ideas to add as well.

We ended the flight with an ILS into Rock Hill. We hit some heavy precip on the last bit of the flight but at around 1500' AGL we broke out from the clouds and the rain calmed down. We descended a little more and did a circle-to-land for runway 20. A very soft touchdown was the icing on the cake!

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