Back in 'The Box'

I've been focusing almost exclusively on training for the commercial and CFI for the past five months, which means virtually all of my flying has been visual.

To put it more bluntly, my instrument skills have gotten rusty as hell.

I've managed to fly three or four trips IFR in the past six months but the weather has been good on all of them and I managed to log a scant 0.8 hours in actual IMC plus just one approach under the hood.

Besides, the irony of flying IFR is that most pilots spend an inordinate amount of time trying to remain in visual conditions. I don't mind flying in actual, in fact I enjoy it, but I also don't see the point in making things harder than they need to be, so I work at staying visual.

All that meant my instrument currency (six approaches, holding, intercept and tracking procedures in the past six months) was due to expire.

So I scheduled a currency session in Linda's new Elite simulator. (Technically it's an "Advanced Aviation Training Device" and "Simulators" are those big, full-motion, multi-million dollar airline boxes.)

I'm a big fan of simulators and Linda has a sweet setup with her new company, SimFlite Minnesota.

The Elite is a nice piece of hardware and incredibly versatile. All of the flight and engine instruments are rendered on flat panel displays built into a cockpit enclosure. That means you can configure the panel to reflect what's actually in your airplane.

If you have an H.S.I. and flight director the Elite can be configured as such. Or, if you have a simple DG and basic Attitude Indicator the panel will show that. Very nice.

The deal-sealing bit for me is the Garmin 430. Most of the airplanes I fly have Garmin 430s and I use that wonderful navigator for everything I do, but I'm by no means an expert. The unit in the Elite is an actual Garmin 430 and acts exactly like it's installed in a real airplane.

Anyhow, we fired up the Elite and flew five approaches and a hold in two hours. That's pretty good, considering I always figured about the best I could do in a real airplane was three approaches in an hour, if I was lucky. If I was flying approaches at different airports those three approaches an hour quickly dropped to two.

Two hours in the Elite costs about the same as an hour in my club 172. Even adding in Linda's time, it's still significantly cheaper than had I rented an airplane and flown with a safety pilot.

The cost savings are only one issue and, in my mind, not the main benefit.

Even under the hood there are enough external visual and aural cues to make it difficult to rely solely on the flight instruments. It's hard not to cheat a bit, no matter how dedicated you are. You catch a glimpse of the ground here, notice how the sunlight changes in the cockpit there, that sort of thing.

In the Elite, well, there's nothing. You're forced to rely totally on what the flight instruments are telling you because there is no external feedback.

The visual display is pretty good as well. Runways ooze into view in low visibility conditions, just like they do in real life. Under the hood in a real airplane you get to minimums, look outside and it's a beautiful day. In the Elite, or in actual conditions, you get to minimums, look outside and it's a crappy day. On a few approaches the runway came into view, disappeared for a bit then returned. Very cool.

My favorite for realistic visuals is still X-Plane, which does an outstanding job accurately rendering lousy weather, terrain, sky conditions and the airport environment. Of course, you can't officially log approaches using X-Plane, at least not yet.

Another huge benefit of the Elite is the ability to freeze the flight and talk about what's going on.

In my case, we were flying the ILS 10R into Flying Cloud and my clearance was to intercept the DME arc that guides you around into position to intercept the localizer. I've flown plenty of DME arcs in training (chances of actually getting cleared onto one in real life are slim to never) so actually flying it wasn't a big deal.

Getting set up for the easiest way to do it took some thinking.

The approach is interesting in that it can make use of three navaids and you need to have at least two different ones tuned in for the final approach portion, which can cause some head scratching:

• The Flying Cloud VOR/DME is used for the arc portion, determining fixes along the localizer and for the missed approach
• The Gopher VOR can be used to determine fixes along the localizer as well via cross-radials
• And, of course, the localizer/glideslope is used to shoot the ILS itself.

Since there are only two navigation radios in the airplane, well, you need to decide which is tuned to what when.

My initial plan was to tune number one to the localizer, number two to the Flying Cloud VOR to fly the arc, then switch number two to Gopher to pick up the cross radial that defines the Final Approach Fix at STUBR and be ready to switch the number one to Flying Cloud VOR in case of a missed approach.

That's a lot of dial twisting and frequency flopping to manage.

Ideally, both number one and number two would be tuned to the localizer during the final approach portion in case the number one navigation radio failed (not an uncommon thing to happen during a simulator session, especially if you weren't already set-up to deal with the occurance) so I could continue on as a localizer-only approach.

But if I did that, well, there would be no way to identify the final approach fix at STUBR.

While all this was percolating in my brain, Linda froze the sim and we talked about it.

The Garmin 430 contains the approach, including the DME arc. I didn't think to load and activate the approach because I hadn't been cleared to FASAP, the fix that defines the beginning of the arc. Instead, I'd been cleared down a different radial and told to intercept the arc.

As Linda pointed out, if I loaded the approach and selected FASAP as my initial point the DME arc would be generated by the GPS. That was all fine and well, but by selecting FASAP the GPS initially was guiding me to that fix and what I really wanted to do was intercept the DME arc.

As I sat there studying the problem I realized that if I went into the FPL page I could highlight the DME arc, press “Direct” and “Enter” and the Garmin would make that portion of the approach the active leg, which meant I could fly my present course and intercept the arc using the GPS.

I'd read about it but never tried it before and it worked like a charm. With the Garmin handling the DME arc portion of the approach I was free to set up my navigation radios as I liked, use the GPS to identify the fixes along the final approach course and life became significantly easier.

Is it legal to use the GPS alone to fly a DME arc on an approach? Probably not.

Is it safe, simple and easy? Yup.

Moral of the story: Always load and activate the approach in the GPS.

Another sweet function of the simulator is the ability to fail instruments in a realistic manner.

Linda failed the vacuum system on my second ILS 10R into Flying Cloud. Just like in real life, the attitude indicator started giving unreliable indications (this one was even equipped with a low-vacuum warning flag, which popped into view making life easier) and slowly rolled over and died.

The really difficult part came when the DG began spinning rapidly as it 'failed.' Making the transition to partial-panel with a DG spinning around madly in the middle of my scan was brutal and it took some serious concentration to ignore.

Normally I'd cover up the dead instruments to minimize the distraction but in the sim I leave them uncovered because it's just that much more difficult.

Once I was able to alter my scan the partial-panel ILS worked out better than I could ever have hoped and I broke out at minimums with the runway more or less right where it was supposed to be.

There are some other cool features as well. The Elite will generate an ATIS broadcast based on the weather programmed in at the time. Tune in the ATIS frequency for an airport and listen, just like in real life. It's a computer-generated voice, but I found that actually added to the realism because it required concentration and added to the workload.

I also love the ability to study your ground track on the instructor's station. It shows where you've been and any little wobbles or heading deviations without mercy. For a beginning student it's a great way to help visualize what they're doing and I find it useful to reinforce that I actually was flying where I thought I was flying.

All told, it was a productive day. I'm instrument current, I learned a few things, my instrument scan is a little less rusty than it was 24-hours ago and I had fun.

Now that I'm an instructor I need to figure out how and when to integrate a simulator session or two into my training. For certain I'll expose private students to an hour or two of instruments in the Elite and as soon as I finish up my CFII I can see spending 10 or even 20 hours in the Elite with instrument rating students.