On climb out, Richard had me put on the hood and head east again. He wanted me to track 090 at 3,000 feet then intercept the 180 radial off of the Bonham VORTAC. He punched in the frequency for the Bohnam VOR (114.6) and had me dial in the CDI for the 180 radial. When I started to see the needle move, I needed to turn to the VOR and track the course.
My big mistake was not thinking about what I learned in ground school. When flying a VOR radial, you fly to the other side. In my case, I was tracking the 180 radial, but I was flying north which means that I should have dialed in the 360 radial. This meant that I had a "FROM" flag in the window instead of a "TO" flag. This also caused me problems chasing the needle.
When tracking a VOR radial, you always chase the needle on the CDI. What that means is that if the needle is moving to the right, you turn to the right (in small increments) to get the needle to stop moving then keep turning the direction (in small increments) to get the needle to move back to the center. Once you get the needle back to the center, take out the added angle you used to intercept the needle and fly the course. Of course this may not be the same as the actual VOR radial because of wind. The VOR doesn't care which way the airplane is pointed, just which way it is tracking through the air. after I changed the CDI to the 360 radial, I got my "TO" flag and was able to "chase the needle" and have it work properly.
Once I finally got to track the radial correctly, I was able to fly it all of the way to BYP. I kept it straight over the top as I flew through the "cone of ambiguity", which happens as you fly over the top of the station. As soon as I got on the other side, my flag flipped for "to" to "from"and I was still tracking 360 degrees.
Before we set up to do some landings at F00, he had me do some steep turns. At least a 45 degree bank, stay with 100 feet of the assigned altitude (3000 feet) and roll out within 10 degrees while still under the hood. The first one was not great but workable. The second one was much better but he had me hold for 450 degrees. Then he had me drop to 1600 feet and take off my hood and we were on top of the F00 airport.
I entered the pattern and was setting up for a short field landing over an obstacle. When I turned base and was setting up for a 60 kt approach I made the remark that it felt like we were crawling. I was tracking 270 degrees and had 65 kts indicated but the GPS had my ground speed at 36 kts. That meant that we had a 29 kt headwind. A Cessna 172 only has a maximum demonstrated crosswind component of 15 kts. As we were sinking, we went through a shear layer and the wind dropped to about 7 kts. We did a few more of the usual short and soft field landings then he had me do a slip to a landing. That one was very hard because of the shear layer.
After I finally got us on the ground, it was time to head home and do the ILS 17 approach to McKinney. I tracked the course that Richard asked me to track, intercepted the localizer and glideslope and tracked it all of the way in. I was a bit tired but felt great. The instrument part of my training is getting interesting. I like the challenge but need a lot more work at it. I only have 1.5 hours of required hood time and 2.6 hours of night flying left for my required training in order for me to take my check ride. I'm supposed to fly this Thursday night to get some night flying out of the way and I'll see what I can do the next weekend to do some more hood work.
My E-logbook
The video for today is from the EAA. It is a video of a "cub like" airplane. Cubs have been around forever and the original ones had small engines in them but they now have turbine cubs (I'll save that for the next post). Enjoy
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