Archive for the ‘IFR Flights’ Category

Flight log 8/21/2010

I had originally planned to take a trip to Martha’s Vineyard this weekend but when I started receiving emails from the FAA regarding upcoming TFRs for President Obama’s planned vacation I figured I should make other plans.

Earlier in the week Gary from the Northeast Flyers had invited me to his lunch run at Georgetown DE. As always it would give me one more chance to meet some fellow pilots and explore a new airport so I made the call to go for it. All I had to do now was figure out who I was going to take. My wife isn’t much of a flyer, so unless we were going on a real trip I wasn’t even going to try. Her friend expressed interest but at the time I was still waiting on responses from some of my fellow pilot friends. As I got the answers back it started to look more and more like this trip was going to be with my son. After all Steven loves to fly with his daddy so all in all not a bad deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Well it really came down to the wire on this one but at 16:00 local we made the final GO call for our trip to Oshkosh this year. We had delayed the trip due to conditions at the north 40 aircraft parking grounds since we are flying in Frank’s Cirrus SR22 and the wheel pants go for around $2000 each! But everything changed when I got a last minute hard surface parking reservation at the Baslier FBO. So as of now we are a go for launch!

I will post facebook updates so check in using our facebook page to the right. We are departing tomorrow morning Friday 7/30.

Lots of pictures and video to come

Yet another chance to meet-up with my fellow pilot friend Gary http://gmflightlog.blogspot.com of the Northeast Flyers and also get some more IFR experience along the way. I had originally planned to fly our Cessna 182RG since I had just earned my complex / high performance endorsements and logged the required 10 hours in the aircraft, but due to a failure of the gear warning system the aircraft was grounded so we took our trusty friend N159SP. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday 6/7 my friend and fellow flying club member Stephen asked if I would like to fly to Hamilton NY for dinner on Friday night. As I am always looking for a chance to fly under the hood and check out new places I agreed.

The original plan was to leave work and head directly to the airport but since I left my camera and change of clothes at home I stopped by the house on the way. As soon as I got in I saw my son. I was hoping to avoid running into him since he always makes me feel bad about flying without him. What can I say, he loves spending time with his daddy and his daddy loves spending time with him. Sure enough, after checking with Stephen to make sure it would be ok to take my son I quickly got him ready and ran to the car just in time for rush hour traffic!

On our way to the airport I called Stephen and asked him to get the airplane ready. I wanted to fly IFR on the first leg since there was an overcast layer at about 4000 feet. As I pulled into the airport Stephen informed me that he was still waiting on fuel and on top of that my overcast layer was quickly breaking up. Read the rest of this entry »

While in route to Martha’s Vineyard my friend and fellow flying club member Stephen and I experienced an alternator controller failure (basically a voltage regulator). It wasn’t a big deal since we were in day visual conditions and the engine does not require electrical power to operate. I have learned a few things from watching the video.. Read the rest of this entry »

Ocean City MD
One of the most common questions I am asked as a pilot is “what is the furthest place you have flown to?” If you are a pilot you know what I mean and after being a pilot for 9 years you would think I would have some really cool answer but actually I didn’t. During the years I had made a few flights to locations such as Nashua NH, Manassas VA, and Providence RI with other pilots but since they did the flight planning and most of the flying I considered myself more of a passenger than a crew member. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally some IMC!
After all of  my IFR flight training you would expect to see some actual IMC (instrument meteorological conditions) flight time in my log book, but after about 42 hours of IFR time there wasn’t much. Just a few flights at altitude in and out of the cloud layer, not what I would consider IMC. Well yesterday I made up for some of that. I didn’t think my simulated instrument time provided enough experience to just hop in the plane solo, takeoff into the soup and fly an approach to minimums; so I opted to fly with an instructor. After calling the flight school the dispatcher let me know that one of the instructors would head up to the airport in about an Read the rest of this entry »

I have been working on my IFR rating for about a year now and after a few months of pretty intensive training I went for my IFR check ride with my DPE (FAA Designated Pilot Examiner).
My first step was to sign up for the IFR ground school at American Flyers in Morristown NJ. I attended the IFR ground course and studied at night. After the 3 day course I took the IFR written exam and passed with a 90%. It wasn’t the 100% I was aiming for but I will take it.  Read the rest of this entry »

My first impression was “this ain’t no VFR training airplane!”. This was My first flight in Keith Smith’s (ks flight log) Lancair 360 and my first flight in anything faster than a Piper Arrow. Read the rest of this entry »

On September 29^th 2007 Irv (a long time member of our flying club) flew Ed (in the back seat) and me (copilot) to Manassas VA for a tour of the state of the art Potomac TRACON facility. This was my first flight in our 182RG N4757T and my first flight using IFR routing. Before this flight I had never really understood the advantage of flying IFR in VMC, but after this flight I was definitely interested in attaining my IFR rating. Read the rest of this entry »