Congrats!!!
Any tricks? Anything unexpected or anything that you struggled with?
Thanks AJ and all:
Some thoughts to share about the ride and my continuing education as a newly minted IR pilot:
With the incoming WX we are expecting, as usual, in this region and especially around Albany NY, the wind shear gets impressive. On the ground, we can be seeing calm conditions and 300 ft AGL its howling, and of course changing wind directions depended on my altitude, so that was the kind of day it was yesterday. I also got dunked from the VOR 28 to the LOC 1 at ALB. It took all I had to keep that needle within scale on some of the approaches, and timing the turns partial paneled into the LOC 1 at ALB was interesting. Doing a N-S hold later on with the groundspeed around 80 kts northbound and 125 kts southbound was also interesting. On my final approach back to the field, keeping the glideslope on an RNAV-WAAS approach southbound to a circle to land northbound was also an adventure (80kts airspeed, 120kts groundspeed)
My CFII and Doug talked about the ride I guess as soon as I departed 1B1 for home. Doug and I debriefed and I was pretty critical about my flying, and we used the debrief as a learning experience as well. Turns out that I was way more harsh on my assessment of my flying than I had to be, but that's just me. I will tell you this, of all the thoughts I have about this rating is a real sense of much deeper responsibility for myself and others in the system, not a burden, but the stakes are greater and the bar has been raised higher than it was before. Thats a good thing, and my personal minimums don't include taking major risks if I can avoid them.
Interesting in the differences in philosophy you see in how one approaches (no pun intended) instrument flying. My training included all the bells and whistles available in my plane (the 430W, an Aera510, Autopilot, DME yada yada) but almost always partial paneled and back to real basics: timed turns, adjusting my scan, vacuum failures and such. So my habits go to the minimalist phase when stuff happens. My checkride critique focused on the opposite view of using the more sophisitcated equipment much more deeply than I am using them now, to backup failed system in the plane. Sort of the glass half empty versus the glass half full philosophy. I truly realize that and now my personal goal is really dig deeply into the capabilities of the GPS systems and how to use them when other things go TU.
:congarats:
