5/7/2023 0 Comments Fltplan go showing holdsOnce, a few months after I’d gotten my ticket, he asked me how my instrument flying was going. Likewise, Richard Collins was a great resource. Always a realist, Mac demystified IFR for me, and much of that was through his straight talk about flight planning, a process that, even after I’d been IFR-rated for a while, was at times overwhelming for me. Tom’s knowledge and experience with real IFR was a godsend. The people who really taught me to think as an instrument pilot were my colleagues Tom Benenson and Richard Collins and my boss, Mac McClellan. What were the real weather hazards? What should I do about planning my instrument flight when there’s high terrain? And how could I get to the point where my real flights weren’t taking three hours to plan? But along the way nobody, not my instructor, not my examiner, talked much about all the things that a new IFR pilot like me was going to have to consider before launching on that IFR flight. For instance, when I got a briefing for a dual cross-country from Lakeland to West Palm Beach to Vero Beach and back to Lakeland, I heard all about a cold front up in Mississippi.ĭespite that cold front hundreds of miles away and heading away from us, I managed to finish that cross-country and get my ticket. The information was hard to understand and put into context. Before the call, I’d lay out the appropriate low-en-route chart and a big planning chart just so I might be able to find the mysterious VORs the briefer invariably mentioned in his descriptions of the weather systems that might come into play. The briefings were pretty grueling, and most of it was hard for me to make sense of. For weather and notams, we’d dial up Flight Service and get a lengthy briefing from a specialist about the proposed flight. My instrument training at FlightSafety Academy, then in Lakeland, Florida, was old-fashioned in every respect, including the way instructors taught us how to plan our flights, which was strictly an analog affair, done using paper charts, a pencil, a plotter and an E6B. Not that it did me much good at the time. April 2010 LIKE A LOT OF PILOTS who learned instrument flying in the mid ’90s, I got my ticket as new technology was just beginning to show up in the cockpits of small airplanes.
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