More training...

.... but only a little bit.

Kevin and I finished my checkout in the Cirrus today, so I'm now officially cleared to fly the thing all by myself.

We decided it would be good to fly an ILS and a GPS approach so I could get some quality time learning the autopilot. In between we'd squeeze in some landings and call it good.

Turns out, the most difficult part of the flight was getting off the ground. Crystal was totally swamped.

It was hard to get a break on the frequency and at one point there were three airplanes lined up on final approach for the always fun, 2,100 foot-long 24R, a cub working the grass otherwise known as 24L, a Baron departing 32L, a Lancair landing 32R and a chopper landing on 32L. And that was just the airplanes in the air.

We sat there at the hold-short line with the Hobbs meter ticking away without mercy and I finally I looked over at Kevin and said 'I'm going to call and tell him we're out of money and would like to taxi back to parking.'

Luckily things settled down and there was a gap so we actually got a takeoff clearance, but not before we'd burned a good 0.4 of an hour (or $48.40 if you want to get really depressed) for engine start, taxi, runup and just sitting around waiting for a takeoff clearance.

It was a relief to get airborne and despite not having flown a Cirrus in nearly two months I managed to more or less keep the thing greasy side down.

I set the heading bug, engaged the autopilot and when we reached 3,500 feet punched the altitude hold and we were on our way to St. Cloud.

We intercepted the localizer a good 25 miles out which was good because it took a couple tries for me to get the autopilot to actually capture and track the localizer signal. The ILS worked out reasonably well and I made a decent landing into a surprisingly strong crosswind.

The crosswind kept picking up and the next two landings were a lot of work. We did a power-off approach (note to self, the SR-20 comes down fast with no power) and I blew the first one but nailed the second.

Then it was back to Crystal to watch the autopilot fly the GPS 14L approach.

The autopilot has a nifty GPSS module, which means it'll fly all the turns in a GPS approach (or any other GPS set of waypoints you care to program in) all by itself. My job was to sit back and watch, manually make the altitude changes and make sure it was going where I expected it to go.

That last bit is more important than it sounds because the thing doesn't quite fly like I expected it to and it'd be easy to stop paying attention only to realize you were going someplace other than where you wanted.

Crystal was using 24L and the wind had really picked up. I flew a reasonable approach then sort of blew it right at the end and wound up drifting a bit. Luckily, I kept it on the runway and we were stopped with room to spare.

Back at the hangar Kevin gave me the good news. I'm now checked out in all of our club airplanes (the 172s, the 182RGs and the SR-20 Cirrus). Now, time to put some hours on the Cirrus by myself to get more comfortable with it.