Flying on faith

So I now know what faith is... it's the belief that the little needles on the little dials on the little instrument panel of a little aeroplane is indeed telling the truth.

1.8 hours of "faith" later, and I had literally worked up a sweat... the inside of the instrument hood was dripping :P

Today was ADF approaches. So instead of "comfortably" flying around at 2500' feet flying holds and tracking to and from NDB's, we left the safety of altitude and practised flying approaches to "minimums".

"Non-precision" Instrument Approaches (like NDB approaches) are designed to allow you to fly safely down to fairly low altitudes, as long as you are where you think you are (faith in the instruments)... the idea being that you drop below the cloud base, spot the runway and commence the actual landing part visually.

Flying to minimums basically means that you fly to the lowest altitude allowed and hope you spot the runway before you reached the "missed approach point", at which point if you haven't spotted the runway, you get the hell out of dodge and climb back up to a safe altitude.

As I was simulating instrument flying conditions with the hood on, I never got to see the runway... so every approach resulted in a missed approach, back into the hold and then time to setup for another approach.


And just because I hadn't had enough "fun" for one day, I went for a quick afternoon jolly with Chris over to Waiheke, to get checked out for landing there... the club have a policy whereby members must first fly a dual check flight here due to some interesting quirks that Waiheke has... like the 45 degree offset approach for runway 17 due to noise abatement procedures, this is also complicated by the the fact that the runway has a pretty pronounced downhill slope in this direction, so if the wind is a moderate southerly you are in for a fun ride ;)

Taking off uphill can also be a challenge as it's harder for the aircraft to the necessary airspeed while it's rolling uphill and then you need to outclimb the slope once airbourne...

Thankfully, the 182 has bucketloads of power and eats the strip alive... even with a moderate tailwind landing downhill! ;)

So after doing some p-charts to confirm that we could safely get in and, arguably more importantly, out again... we headed off to Waiheke, completed take-off's and landings in all directions to get a feel for all the approaches and to see that it actually makes more sense sometimes to land with a small tailwind because it's up the hill than to land down the hill with a small headwind!


These Flights: 1.8 Dual (1.4 IFR) + 0.8 Dual
Total Hours: 308.2 (146.0/136.2 Day, 8.6/17.4 Night, 16.1 IFR)