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It’s been a loong time since I last posted. Things have been slow at work, home and hobby front so not much to report. The PNW weather, as usual, has been not ideal for my hobbies. While things have been slow on hobby front, we did have a little bit of travel that has kept us going through the gray winter. First, there was a family wedding at the beggning of November in Arizona. It was wonderful not only because we were able to meet with family after such a long time and partake in a week long wedding celebration but also because the weather was wonderful. Second, we made a short trip down to San Diego for the christmas break. While the gray skies followed us there, it was neverthless a nice break. While in Arizona, I also got checked out to fly C172 from a local flight school. The details of which, I will cover in another post. This post, however, focuses on long cross country requirement for my Instrument rating which I was able to sneak in during the thanksgiving weekend where we had unusually good weather for a day!

My long cross country was from Paine Field airport down to Hilsboro Oregon with a missed approach on the way back at Olympia airport. The day was interesting with a lot of learnings. First, we delayed the start of our flight by an hour because the TAF for Olympia had clouds at 1000 ft. The rest of the route had clear skies or very high clouds. We were unsure if it was low level fog with relatively low tops or a cloud layer that extended up to the altitude we were supposed to fly. During summer, that wouldn’t be a problem but the freezing level during this time of the year is very low. In fact, it was about 1000 ft on that day so going into the clouds was out of question. The forecast was getting better with each TAF so we thought it’s probably fog that should burn off soon. We figured that we will start the flight and in the worst case scenario, go around or turn back. Luckily we did not have to do either. I filed the IFR plan, preflighted the plane and started the run up and requested clearance. However, tower said that they do not have my flight plan. Apparently, my plan was not approved by flight service. I’m not sure what happened but one lesson learnt is to wait for a confirmation email that the flight plan was accepted before getting on the plane.

My CFII filed a new plan and they accepted it but when I got my clearance, they had given a different route than what we had filed. There was an interesting waypoint that ATC assigned us – If I recall it correctly, it was 20NM on the 178 radial from the SEA VOR. While I noted it accurately, and read-it back to the controller, I had to clarify with my CFII on how to identify it on the charts. He showed it to me on GTN650 by creating a user waypoint. I also learnt that, in Garmin pilot, when you go to add a new user way point in the settings menu, there is an option is to define it by Radial/Distance from a specific VOR. After adding the way point, I updated my flight plan and loaded and from then on it was a pretty smooth ride for the entire 4 and half hour 430 mile journey. The CFII I flew with was not my regular CFI who I had grown comfortable with and let’s just say this CFII has some quirks that make for an interesting ride 🙂 . Don’t get me wrong he is a pretty good CFII, I think its just that his style of training is much different from my regular one who I really love to train with.

Anyway, overall it was a pretty good cross country flight. The one key thing that I learnt I need to improve on is my ability to switch between flying with the instruments and working with my EFB (electronic flight bag) by reducing my time with my iPad/Garmin pilot app so that I don’t deviate beyond the allowable limits for altitute and heading. By the end of the flight, I was pretty exhausted more so from wearing the hood than the actual flying and needed a nice restful afternoon to recover. I’m glad that I was able to get the long cross country out of the way and complete my flight requirements for instrument rating. Now the only hurdles (although, pretty big ones) keeping me from my rating are written and checkride. Although, I think I will need a whole lot of flying practice before I take my check ride but to do that I need to get my written out of the way…. just need to find time to study. Hopefully soon… May be I should be focusing on studying rather than blogging? Well, I have not been giving attention to the blog as well, so … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

While I procrastinate on everything, why don’t I leave you with some pictures from my flight and the flight path as recorded by Garmin