I passed my instrument flight test this morning -- thank you all for the positive karma you sent my way. We did the test in the real thing, hard-core IFR with a 400 ft ceiling and rain. My visual contact with the ground during the entire test was probably less than two minutes. A narrative follows for people who like that kind of thing (everyone else can stop reading now).
The ground work went fine, but I wasn't worried about it. After startup and clearance copying, we taxied to 04, and I double-checked the ceiling with ground before switching to tower (when the DFTE asked earlier, I told him that 400 ft would be my personal limit). At that point the DFTE took the foggles from me, said that I obviously wouldn't be needing them, and put them away for the rest of the flight. We took off, and in a few moments, the world vanished into white all around us. We were cleared up to 6000, then direct to the Ottawa VOR to start a simulated cross-country to North Bay. At the VOR, I turned onto V316, intercepted it promptly, and was stabilized on course and groundspeed by 2 DME (not bad, since we were 1 mile above the VOR to start with). I then hauled out my E6B, calculated a revised ETA and fuel burn based on my current DME groundspeed, and then just sat back and relaxed the rest of the way out to 9 DME. Ottawa Terminal then cleared us back to the VOR for a hold north on the 360 radial. I flew back the 270 radial (90 TO), then turned sharply to intercept my inbound radial outbound with reverse sensing for a parallel entry (I like doing it that way, so that I get DME groundspeed readouts to plan the rest of the hold). We did a couple of laps in the hold, then I asked terminal for a couple of vectored approaches (no full procedures in hard-core IFR, since I'd mess up their very busy airspace). They vectored me around for a while, then set me up to intercept the NDB 07 (at which point the examiner failed my DME, just to keep me honest on the stopwatch work). The approach went fairly well -- I did bust MDA by 20 ft, but caught it and recovered in less than a second, and the DFTE didn't mention it in the debrief. My compass precessed a few degrees during the descent, so I ended up a bit away from the runway when we got a glimpse of the ground straight down through the mist just before going missed, but there's nothing to do about that. Tower handed me back to terminal, who vectored me south to bring me around for the ILS 07 to a full stop. I asked for a bit of time to prepare, but they had a boatload of arrivals about to hit (all airliners), so I agreed to go straight to the approach and just asked not to be vectored too close into the NDB on final. They brought me around for an intercept 8 miles out and then asked for maximum approach speed, so I opened the throttle, pushed the nose down, and shot on in at 110 kias. The needles stayed nicely centred all the way, but I did feel my first unease in IMC when I thought of how fast I was flying and how close to the (invisible) ground I was as I got closer to DH. The runway came into view less than a mile back, just as I was calling out advisory visibility, and 50 feet above DH the DFTE said "OK, you're visual, go ahead and land". Fortunately, 07 is an 8000 ft runway, since I was at 110 kias and 250 ft almost over the threshold and the runway was wet and slick. I brought up the nose and dropped flaps, but I didn't want to do any serious braking on the wet surface, so I let the plane roll on past the intersection with 14/32, ending two or three miles on the far side of the airport from our destination on the North Field. We had a long taxi back, but the DFTE didn't say anything about whether I'd passed or failed, and the 20 ft MDA bust started to loom larger in my mind. When I came inside (wet) for the debrief, he chewed me out for not putting on carb heat every 15 minutes or so in IMC (not part of the test, fortunately), then filled out the examination form in front of me from memory. The NDB approach was one of the last items, and it was only when I saw him give me a 3/5 for that that I was fairly certain I'd passed. He then shook my hand, told me that I was a good, safe, competent IFR pilot, and endorsed my license. Well, that's it for now. We have to retake the IFR flight test every two years in Canada, so I'll be back up in Summer 2005. All the best, David -- David Megginson, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.megginson.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
