Currency

My instrument currency was set to expire so I booked some time in the sim with Linda to fly a bunch of approaches.

It doesn't sound like much, but managing to log six approaches and a hold every six months has been tough.

I've probably taught 50 approaches this year alone but didn't fly a single one myself. A few of those approaches started out in IMC, but just barely, and after we'd descended a few hundred feet we were in the clear so it while it was technically legal for me to log them as an approach I didn't.

I'd wanted to fly some approaches in the 182RG but my schedule and the airplane's availability never quite worked out, much less coordinating with a safety pilot. So it was into the Elite.

We set it up as a Bonanza to keep things interesting and to get some practice using the autopilot and flight director.

The autopilot in the Elite emulates a King KAP 150, which I find not particularly intuitive to use. Truth is, I just haven't studied it so it's a mystery box to me. I'm much more familiar with the Stec 55x.

Of course, the 55x was a mystery to me too until I spent 8 hours flying down to Florida with one a while back then a couple more hours blasting around in a newish SR-22 with an instructor buddy flying approaches. Now it's an old friend and I assume the KAP 150 will start making sense eventually as well.

The checklist for the Bonanza was missing, so we improvised, got the sim started and took off into 300 foot ceilings and ¾ mile visibility.

Linda showed me a neat trick for using the HSI to fly a DME arc (turn 90 degrees onto the arc as normal, then set the course selector ahead 10 degrees, at which point you simply fly so the CDI is perpendicular to your heading and when it centers you advance the course selector another 10 degrees and do the same thing) and I flew a reasonable ILS-27 back into Anoka.

Flying the sim as a Bonanza was a reminder of how important it is to know which power settings and pitch attitudes give you the desired performance. I had no clue, of course, so it took some experimentation before I settled on the numbers I liked.

It also took a bit to figure out the Bonanza's attitude indicator. For some reason I really wanted to place the bottom of the triangular miniature airplane on the horizon bar. Well, that's about a 10 degree nose-up pitch attitude and didn't work out very well.

Once I figured out that I needed to stick the top point of the triangle on the horizon bar things worked out much better and I stopped busting my altitudes.

We flew another ILS into Flying Cloud, this time with a frozen static system. I caught the frozen static system malfunction pretty quickly but forgot to switch the CDI from GPS to VLOC and couldn't figure out why I wasn't getting a glideslope. Linda pointed out the mistake, backed me up a few miles and I flew the ILS without an altimeter and VSI.

That's one of the beauties of the sim: You can fail stuff in a realistic manner and back up a bit to try it again. I'd expected the Garmin 430 to switch over from GPS to VLOC automatically. For some reason it didn't, despite already having the localizer frequency in the active nav position.

Weird, and a good lesson. The box was configured properly and should have switched over but I forgot to double-check that the box was doing what I expected it to do.

Anyhow, we flew a couple of GPS approaches, a hold and an NDB approach and I was current again.

It was a good session and I learned some new tricks along with dusting off some old ones I knew but hadn't used in a while.

In a perfect world we'd all fly with flight directors, autopilots and an HSI. The reality is different, of course, and it's still important to know how to turn the damn things off and just fly the airplane.

I still need to get out in the real airplane and fly some approaches to stay sharp but at least I'm legal for another six months.