I was reminded that I haven’t made any updates about the flying lately. Well there’s a reason: there hasn’t been anything to show off, or even really to see!
I’ve been training for my Instrument Rating, which involves doing a lot of flying with a view limiting device on. There are a number of different view limiters, everything from foggy glasses to big hoods, but they all do the same thing: prevent you from seeing outside the plane. The goal is to practice flying as though we were in the clouds and only have our instruments to guide us.
In order to practice this we need a second pilot in the plane to act as a safety pilot and keep looking out the window to make sure we don’t run into anyone. This doesn’t have to be an instructor, so in order to save some money (sorry instructors!) we go out with another student and one of us simulates being in the clouds while the other acts as safety pilot. And we’ve mostly been doing it at night in the dark because one of the other things that we need to build hours for is night flying time. And also it’s much cooler at night.( Yes, I’m aware that it’s October. Apparently the sun is not. Still, I’ve been getting to almost 100 degrees during the day here.)
So there’s not a lot for me to show off. All I’ve seen for the last 30 hours of flying or so is this:
Instrument flying is super fun for me though. It’s very by-the-numbers, very precise, very Josh.
Because of the way training works we students simply need to go practice, or “time build”. We need to get to a certain number of hours to be able to take the next test. Currently I’m working on getting the necessary time under the view limiting devices for by Instrument Rating, and then I’ll need another 100+ hours to get to the minimums for the commercial rating. And after that is the long climb to 1500 hours to have enough that insurance companies will let you get hired by the big companies!
So we just go out and fly around and practice. The other night we went to 7 different airports all around the DFW area, just to practice our approaches to landing. While we were out I had my safety pilot, Breck, take a quick picture so at least I’d have something to show you:
Last night I did my required long cross-country (250 nautical miles, landings at three different airports) with my instructor Nathan. We were out for 4.1 hours, and we were on an actual flight plan for the first time. Between air traffic control telling us exactly where to go, and using the autopilot to stick to the path given to us, there’s not a lot of hand-on-the-yoke flying that actually happened. Seems like cheating, but in practice learning how to utilize the autopilot and stick to the dictated route is a large part of learning to fly the big planes!
On one of our night flights I did sneak a peek outside for a minute and grabbed a (blurry) picture:
I’ll be done with the required simulated-instrument time after just one more flight, and we’ll go to taking turns, so I should get the chance to appreciate the view a bit more soon. (I took Bevin out for her first night flight on Sunday and it was great to be able to look out across the city while we flew over it.)
Back to work on preparing for the instrument rating test, coming up soon!