Wind!

Today was going to be a $100.00 omelet flight up to Lake Havasu City (KHII) and back. A couple of things happened to change my plans. First, my right seat cancelled on me late yesterday; citing some lame excuse of parental responsibility. He had to drive his son to school… That was OK, and since the “flying for fun” objective was altered somewhat, I gave my CFI, Scott, a call to see if he wanted to fly. Fortunately he did. Don’t get me wrong – I like Scott. It’s still fun flying with Scott – hell, it’s fun flying with anyone. The problem with flying with Scott (or practically any other good CFI) is that the flights take on purpose in addition to fun. I was sort of on the fence as to whether I wanted to fly for a purpose; however, at $50.00 per hour, it’s prudent.

This brings me to the second reason for the change in plans. Weather. More specifically, wind. I called flight services and the briefing was grim. Winds were 20kts gusting to 30kts in KHII. Not a good idea to try and land in those winds… Also, the winds were not favoring any of my other regular destinations with good restaurants. So the decision was made to make this an IFR training flight.

I began pre-flight while Scott ran into the office to get some approach plates. We took off from RWY 4R and turned southeast. While heading towards Casa Grande (KCGZ), we loaded the VOR approach for RWY 5 at KCGZ. I learned some pretty cool tricks on the Garmin GNS430 today and I’m grateful that Scott is one of those instructors who is really patient while I try to figure things out. Furthermore, that GNS430 coupled with a really good HSI is the next best thing to flying a glass cockpit. Now, we live in a desert. Deserts have a lot of sand. When sand becomes airborne, it affects visibility. I would classify the visibility at some points during our flight today as very marginal VFR. As we were on a three mile final into KCGZ, our crab angle essentially had us flying sideways. It was really cool! We declared a missed approach and flew to the Stanfield VOR (TFD). We entered a hold at TFD and set up for the GPS approach to RWY 23. We went missed and headed east to Coolidge (P08) and did an ILS approach for RWY 5 and finally a VOR approach for RWY 23.

There are a lot of things going on in an approach and I can see why there is a currency requirement for IFR pilots. We talked about and performed the 5Ts:

T turn to proper heading

T time hold or approach

T twist OBS knob to inbound course

T throttle adjustments, as required

T talk - procedure turn inbound, entering the hold, etc.

Plus you have to know what altitude and heading you need to fly as you cross each fix. Not to mention that you can conceivably be doing all of this in IMC. Fun stuff!

After we determined that it was clearly too windy to land anywhere, I donned my JeppShades and we practiced flying vectors and altitudes with climbing and descending turns. We did some unusual attitude recoveries and triangulated our position using VORs. After about an hour of simulated instrument flying, we headed back home to Falcon Field (KFFZ). Winds at KFFZ were 040 09kts gusting to 15 kts – right down the runway. We did three touch-and-gos and then called it a day.

All in all, it was a great day of flying. I learned a lot and I like flying in choppy air. My next IFR lesson is scheduled for next Friday.

Flight time: 2.4 hours

Total time: 99.6