IFR Approaches

I went flying today with my friend Kieth again. He wanted to do some time under the hood shooting RNAV approaches in 737TY because it has a Garmin 430W GPS in it. It does not have an auto-pilot though. Kieth hasn't flown this plane in a couple of years so he was a little rusty. I fly this one all of the time so I gave him some pointers on flying the little, slow Cessna compared to the Cirrus and Pipers he likes to fly. The other airplanes he likes to fly handle much different than our little 172.

We left McKinney and turned to the northeast where we flew the RNAV approach to Bonham(F00). We even flew the published hold before we started the final approach. My job was to be his eyes while he was using his view limiting device. All he could see was what was in front of him., nothing outside the airplane. If I saw something going wrong, I could reach in and correct it. As we got lined up for our final and got to the decision altitude, he pulled off his goggles and saw the field and we did a missed approach, climbed to 2500 feet and then started on our next leg.

The second part of our journey was to go to Sulphur Springs (KSLR) for another approach and to get some lunch. Everything went well here too, until we landed. Keith hasn't flown 7TY much and it sits up a lot higher than most of the other airplanes he flies so his approach was a lot hotter than I would do and he also didn't realize how low the wheels were so we hit a little hard and bounced a couple of times. We walked over to the Redbarn Cafe and had some lunch. A lot of people have been telling me about this place but I have never been. One of the complaints that I read about on AirNav.com said that this is a smoking restaurant but on Sundays, they don't allow smoking from 12 to 2 PM. We got there at 1 PM. The food was good and we were ready to go so Keith said that he wanted to file IFR going back.

We used my iPhone to file an IFR flight plan on DUATS. So we took off from Sulphur Springs and headed to McKinney. We picked up our flight plan just after we made our turn to the west. Unfortunately, ATC didn't want to give us the RNAV approach into McKinney we wanted so we had to go straight in. We did have to deviate a little to avoid some skydivers near Caddo Mills (7F3). Since we filed IFR, I was able to get a snapshot from FlightAware.com of our trip.

Since I am not a private pilot yet, I was not able to log any of this time. If I was, I could log this as PIC since I was technically the safety pilot, since Keith was under the hood. It is still a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon.