Under the Hood

On Thursday, 23 September, I flew Lesson #15 in Jeppesen's Part 141 syllabus.
I spent almost an hour under the hood during this lesson, which focused on attitude instrument flying. First, I tracked a radial out to the Casanova VORTAC.  The ground track was a little better than last lesson, but I found it slightly awkward at first to add the Course Deviation Indicator (CDI) to my instrument scan.  We did unusual attitude recovery again, which is fun and one item that I should have no problems meeting the PTS minimums. I did power-off and power-on stalls under the hood as well.    

After passing Casanova, I changed heading and a few minutes later my CFI asked me where I was (still with the hood on).  I tuned up 113.5 MHz in the second NAV radio and identified the morse code transmission from the ARMEL VORTAC. I found the radial that I was on and formed a rough two radial fix by eyeball (didn't get out my plotter).

I had one rough short-field landing, but the landing technique seemed to click for me this lesson and I was stoked.  I did a few soft-field takeoffs, which were also a little better.

Next lesson will be at night.  I need to get 8 night takeoffs/landings in to be sure that I'll have the FAA minimum of 10 in before my training is completed.

Flight time this lesson: 1.6 hrs dual, 0.9 hrs simulated instrument
Total time to date: 17.9 hrs dual, 3.5 hrs PIC, 2.2 hrs simulated instrument