IFR Lesson 1 - Aint No Sunshine
11/19/2007 Filed in: Flying
IFR Lesson 1 - Aint No Sunshine
There I sit on the runway at Smyrna in my trusty DA-40. It's never let me down before, but today there are clouds littering the sky, obscuring any hope I have of seeing anything above 200 AGL. I'm not nervous though, because I know that even on my first IFR lesson I'll be a wicked badass, capable of one-handed, blind-folded approaches to minimums in the dark with a failed engine. Well, that and today I'll be flying the MOTUS full-motion simulator.
Right away I demonstrate my inordinate skill by sliding off the virtual runway during takeoff. Who knew the DA-40 was such a good soft-field performer? I head up into the nether regions of my cloudy domain while CFII (who, by the way, is CFI1 from my private days) thinks of new and interesting ways to screw me up.
Me: Hey, did you preflight this thing?
CFII: Yeah, oil and tires are good.
Me: Cool.
I find the sim very much more difficult to control than a real airplane. The controls are extremely sensitive and yet have this persistent mush to them like you're in a constant power-off stall. For the most part, I can overcome this, but it's not at all unusual for me to be dead on my assigned altitude, reach up to tune a VOR, and by the time I look back I'm in a free fall. That'll teach me to divide my attention.
We do a fair bit of VOR tracking, constant airspeed climbs and descents, and start compass turns. Unfortunately, the sim is pretty bad at simulating the fact that your compass will never actually show you where you're headed. Unless you're in a perpetual motion airplane driving only east and west, never deviating from level flight or turning. I've seen a few of those lately on Trade-A-Plane... tempting.
CFII is not happy with the way the simulated DA-40 flies either. He says it flies too fast and begins some minor voodoo to fix that in the plane builder software. In doing so, he shows me his vulnerable OCD underbelly. We'll get along fine.
He also gives me a piece of paper with what can only be described as a big, curvy squiggle on it. That's a technical, aeronautical term, so don't feel bad if it's over your head. Along side the squiggle are notes like "climb to 4000", "descend to 2000", etc. My job is to fly the squiggle and follow the directions. I find the task moderately busy, but I generally handle the workload well enough.
To end the day I perform my best Ted Striker "Airplane" landing. If there's one thing truly off about this sim, it's that my landing did not crash the "airplane". There's just no good excuse for why that didn't happen. Hell, I was almost disappointed. Think I'll write me a letter.
There I sit on the runway at Smyrna in my trusty DA-40. It's never let me down before, but today there are clouds littering the sky, obscuring any hope I have of seeing anything above 200 AGL. I'm not nervous though, because I know that even on my first IFR lesson I'll be a wicked badass, capable of one-handed, blind-folded approaches to minimums in the dark with a failed engine. Well, that and today I'll be flying the MOTUS full-motion simulator.
Right away I demonstrate my inordinate skill by sliding off the virtual runway during takeoff. Who knew the DA-40 was such a good soft-field performer? I head up into the nether regions of my cloudy domain while CFII (who, by the way, is CFI1 from my private days) thinks of new and interesting ways to screw me up.
Me: Hey, did you preflight this thing?
CFII: Yeah, oil and tires are good.
Me: Cool.
I find the sim very much more difficult to control than a real airplane. The controls are extremely sensitive and yet have this persistent mush to them like you're in a constant power-off stall. For the most part, I can overcome this, but it's not at all unusual for me to be dead on my assigned altitude, reach up to tune a VOR, and by the time I look back I'm in a free fall. That'll teach me to divide my attention.
We do a fair bit of VOR tracking, constant airspeed climbs and descents, and start compass turns. Unfortunately, the sim is pretty bad at simulating the fact that your compass will never actually show you where you're headed. Unless you're in a perpetual motion airplane driving only east and west, never deviating from level flight or turning. I've seen a few of those lately on Trade-A-Plane... tempting.
CFII is not happy with the way the simulated DA-40 flies either. He says it flies too fast and begins some minor voodoo to fix that in the plane builder software. In doing so, he shows me his vulnerable OCD underbelly. We'll get along fine.
He also gives me a piece of paper with what can only be described as a big, curvy squiggle on it. That's a technical, aeronautical term, so don't feel bad if it's over your head. Along side the squiggle are notes like "climb to 4000", "descend to 2000", etc. My job is to fly the squiggle and follow the directions. I find the task moderately busy, but I generally handle the workload well enough.
To end the day I perform my best Ted Striker "Airplane" landing. If there's one thing truly off about this sim, it's that my landing did not crash the "airplane". There's just no good excuse for why that didn't happen. Hell, I was almost disappointed. Think I'll write me a letter.