Last Weekend, Part #1 – The flight

The mission was to get to Ottawa and points north. I was going to Maddy’s interment on Saturday, and spending some time with my kids on Sunday. I had booked the club’s Dakota, which is my favourite plane, but when the Lance became available I switched to it instead – the Lance is a bit faster, which is nice, but the main reason is that the club’s insurance company is looking to restrict who can use the Lance so it won’t hurt to have a lot of Lance hours on record.

The day dawned as a perfect IFR day – broken clouds at about 1200 feet, another layer at 4000 feet and another layer much higher. That meant I could get above the clouds and fly in the clear air between them, and probably have an instrument approach at the other end. The air was relatively calm and still. It was early in the day, so hardly any convective action.

I filed for a route around the lake – KROC LORTH v2 KONDO ART CYOW knowing full well that Wheeler Sack would tell me I had to fly to CYRIL.ONE arrival route, but being unable to convince the FAA to let me put that arrival into the computer. I pre-programmed it into my GPS, however.

I filed for 7000 feet, which put me well above the clouds. Amazingly enough I got “cleared as filed” – they usually give me “direct ART, then as filed”, which puts me straight across the lake. Last time I flew they tried to do that to me but I had a new engine and couldn’t fly high. This time I wouldn’t have minded if they had, but they didn’t offer it and I didn’t request it because I couldn’t pick up ART until I was half way to KONDO.

I took off and I could only catch glimpses of the ground below me. It was beautiful with the green and blue though the white, and occassional signs of the world below me waking up. Part of the time I was in and out of misty clouds at my level. As I passed by Watertown, there was a very large but extremely localized build up right off my right wing tip, with the sun peeking between a cleft in the cloud. I took some pictures of it but I haven’t unloaded my camera yet.

Everything went pretty smoothly – with the smooth air I hand-flew about half the time, only turning on George when I wanted to check a chart or take a picture.

When I got to Ottawa, I was in solid clouds from the time they started giving me a descent to the approach until about half way between the outer marker and the minimum descent altitude. And that’s where I felt really bad about my flying. I don’t know what it is about the Lance, but when I do approaches in it in actual IMC, it seems that I end up doing “s-turns along the localizer” – every time I look at the AI I’m in a 30 degree bank to one side or the other. I was also high on the glide slope the whole time – I nearly lost the glide slope indicator off the bottom just before I broke out. I don’t have these problems with the other aircraft in either simulated or real conditions or with the Lance when I’m using foggles, just in the Lance in actual. I think I might be fixating on the HSI and not looking at the AI enough. I really need to find a day with a ceiling a few hundred feet above MDA and do some approaches and get used to this plane some more.

The flight home was another proof that having the IFR rating was a good thing. There were a couple of tiny little splotches of green on the radar picture on Intellicast just before I took off, but they looked like they were disappating. Plus I had the Storm Scope, so I’d know if they were still around when I got there. So I filed for 8000 feet for the flight home, on the reverse of my outbound route. Once again, even though they won’t let me file it this way, I got the expected ammendment to my clearance to tell me to fly the OTTAWA.ONE departure. And that’s exactly what I’d already plugged into my GPS. Unlike last time when I had a new engine, they didn’t clear me direct to Rochester from the Watertown VOR (ART), but I got what I filed so who was I to complain?

Again, the weather was mostly VFR, but broken clouds below me before the lake and a very thick haze south of the lake made me glad to be on an instrument flight plan. It also got a bit convective on the south side of the lake, so I engaged George to deal with the altitude – but George kept telling me I had to adjust the trim one way or the other, so I took that as confirmation that it wasn’t my fault that it was hard for me to hold altitude.

But all was not perfect – the HSI was very balky. The TO/FROM indicators on the HSI kept disappearing, but the NAV flag wasn’t coming out. I’d have both nav radios tuned to the same VOR, and the HSI and the other OBS set to the same radial, and the other OBS and my GPS would both show me right on, or half a dot to one side, while the HSI would show me 4 dots to the other side. So basically I had to ignore the HSI and fly the GPS monitoring the OBS constantly. I was sure glad that conditions at Rochester were good enough that I didn’t have to fly an approach – I’m not sure if I could really trust the HSI in actual. As it was, I flew a visual approach to a runway that had an ILS, and the HSI seemed to agree with what my eyes were telling me.

I had one of the more pleasant experiences with US Customs at Rochester. I’d filled out my form CF-178 before I left, so when I got in 5 minutes after my filed ETA I handed the guy the form, showed him my pilots license, answered about two questions, and he was satisfied. So much nicer than some of my previous experences there.