Friday, December 30, 2011

3rd Day at ATP

Well today I was supposed to be at the school at 11:30 am to work on the sim a little bit; however, I got a text from my instructor telling me that his other student was sick and If I wanted to come over earlier, so I did. I arrived at 9:20 am but on my way to school I noticed there was a low overcast layer of clouds so I thought we were going to do just sim stuff.
When I got there he actually sent me to pre-flight the Seminole, ceilings at Winder were at 3,400 so he filed an IFR plan so we could do pattern work at Winder. When we were ready to taxi, my instructor noticed in his foreflight app that the weather was getting worse and was about to get to minimums, you really don't want to fly when the weather is below minimums so we parked the airplane again and we decided to wait and see what happened.
I went to the back of the room and just went through all the flows, and studied the short field takeoff and landing procedures.. after about 45 minutes, the instructor came back.- "let's go, it is still IFR but it got better" so off we went.
We departed from runway 20L and he let me had the controls while we went through the clouds, it was amazing. I remember having about half hour of real instrument flying during my private lessons and it is beautiful. That view made me remember why I love to fly.
I think I did pretty good maintaining altitude and heading, I got more comfortable on my second day of flying today. We arrived at Winder and practiced short field take off and landings, engine shutoff while taking off, and simulated engine failure while in the pattern. Everything went good, I just MUST remember to retract the landing gear just after getting a positive rate of climb on a short field takeoff.
On our way back we were flying above the clouds, I was able to get a couple of pictures of that.
Approach had us on hold for a while because there were fast flying airplanes on approach until he was able to squeeze us in.
My instructor did an ILS to 20L and that was it for today. Oh! I already have scheduled my multi-engine check ride for Tuesday! Tomorrow we are not going to fly but I'll stop over and learn my flows on the sim. Thanks for reading.





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