Simulating St. Patty's Day

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Final Approach
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Ben
Simulating St. Patty's Day (Today's Lesson)

Simulating St. Patty’s Day

Today’s lesson was on the sim, again. The goal was to refine the approaches we would be doing during my long IFR X-C. If you don’t want to read the whole report, the short version is that everything went pretty well, and I’m ready for my St. Patty’s Day X-C.

Approach #1:
VOR Rwy 9 at KHGR. The only trick here is to remember the dogleg after crossing the VOR. I did turn, but was late in twisting the OBS to the new heading. My CFII said nothing, of course, but I caught my error within a few seconds of making it. I twisted to the final heading of 091 and found that I was right on course. Needle centered throughout this approach, but I descended a bit faster than necessary on the procedure turn outbound. The only other ding I would give myself this approach was that I read my MDA off of the circling section instead of the straight-in (for which I was cleared). Of course, the circling minimums are higher, so there was never a safety issue.​

Approach #2:
LOC-A at KCBE. :eek: This is the famous “nasty” approach that I’ve been mulling over the past couple of weeks. To get to the IAF, you have to go direct to CBE NBE, fly outbound on the 057 bearing for 3.6 miles, and intercept the localizer outbound. Again, we did this with about 30 knots of wind from the north. I allowed for that, but was still a bit high at the IAF; other than that, it went swimmingly. Just for giggles we did that approach again, and this time I was exactly at the MDA before the IAF.​

Approach #3:
This was the VOR/DME Rwy 8 at KLNS (the DME ARC approach). I had briefed the approach with my CFII, and he agreed with my assessment. For today, he vectored me to intercept LRP R-215, cleared to start the approach from JONJR. While I flew the ARC and final approach just fine, I was a bit hesitant in my wind corrections. The correct heading to fly doesn’t just pop into my head—I need a couple of seconds to think it through. The thought process is something like: The OBS is set to 225, so I need to turn to . . . 225 + 90 = 315 + 10 degree wind correction = 325. I think the solution here is for me to practice more DME ARCs at home, until they become mundane.​

All in all, a good dry run for the 17th!
 
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