Instrument continued

So now that I only fly two days of the week, I am condensing my posts a little bit. However, I am still getting my 3-4 flights in per week as I now have double blocks on Thursdays and Fridays.

Thursday was a little interesting and COLD to say the least! We covered an about an hour of ground material before going outside in the frigid temps to uncover the plane (172SJ) and attempt to start it up in the freezing cold. Since it was so cold we first tried under-priming it a little bit since we didn't want to do too much too fast. Better to under-prime than to over-prime. We definitely underprimed it to start and it didn't even turn over. Then we went to the opposite extreme and ended up flooding the engine....gave it a rest to drain and they almost got it started, then it just putted out. So that was a disappointing start. Thankfully, I was the only one in there for a lesson on Thursday so we just uncovered another plane (721SA), hopped in and kept our fingers crossed that it would start up right away. Sure enough, first try, kicked right over. So, up I went for about an hour and a half with Josh to practice my maneuvers under the hood. Nothing to eventful, everything was good, I just had some trouble holding my heading and altitude a couple time, within 30 degrees and a couple hundred feet. But, the kicker is, when you start filing and flying IFR flight plans, you may get a call from ATC if you're off by a couple hundred feet as that is the max they allow to be from your assigned altitude. Gotta work on that a bit!

Friday was just as cold! We took 721SA right away since we knew it had the better chance of starting up right away. Josh and myself went up for about 3.3 hours broken up into 2 blocks. We spent the morning flying around the South Shore and then followed the localizer, Instrument Landing System into Plymouth. The ILS is basically an invisible crosshair in the air that guides you down, both vertically and horizontally to the middle of the runway it is assigned to. It's a really neat instrument in the cockpit and amazing at how well it really works. It's really wierd to be coming down from altitude getting really anxious as you know you are only a few hundred feet above the ground still wearing your view-limiting glasses (so you can't see outside), when Josh tells me, "OK, take off your glasses." Low and behold we are perfectly lined up with the center of the runway on a short 1/2 mile final. It's truly amazing what you can do when you learn to trust the instruments more than you trust your own seat of the pants instincts, because often times in flight, what your body is telling you is the opposite of what you're actually doing. We went up and practiced tuning and tracking VORs, turning to different VORs, slow flight, stalls - both landing and take-off, steep turns (which were really bad, I could have done better, but that's what practice is for), unusual attitudes, and threw in some partial panel flying, which is when we simulate a vacuum failure and fly with the attitude indicator (pitch and bank) and directional gyro (gyroscopic compass) covered up so you can't see them and fly with limited instrumentation. All in all I did really well and am progressing nicely. In 2 more weeks I will already be at my stage 1 written exam and checkride!