Lesson 16 - Review and Instrument Flight

Flight Time: 2.2 hours
Total Time: 24.8 hours

After nearly a month without flying, I seemed to have gotten lucky this weekend. Today was my second day in a row of flying, and while cloudy, the ceilings were high (about six or seven thousand feet) and the winds were low. Today’s goal was to have a small-scale check flight to go over everything I’ve learned so far, then follow it up with some more instrument work.

We started off by practicing slow flight, stalls and steep turns on our way to Monroe, where I was finally able to get a picture of the mountain valley I’d talked about in my December 6 entry. If anything the recent snow we’d received since then made the site even more spectacular.

Valley Leading up to Stevens Pass

A Dam at Lake Chaplain
North of Monroe, WA

From there, we circled around to the south, where Ed had me use the map to find our location and make our way to Firstair, a small airport that he’d never landed at because there really isn’t much of anything there.

While over the airport, Ed pulled the throttle and let me know that my engine had died, and that I needed to land. I got myself into the pattern fairly well, but had a hard time on final approach. At the end of the runway was a hill with some tall trees on it, which made me feel that I was much lower than I really was. What I should have done was slip to get myself down after passing the hill, but I had to go around two times before finally making the landing on my third attempt.

As we were slowing down, a coyote ran into the runway a few hundred feet in front of us. He got a look at us, thought better of trying to beat us across the runway and tucked tail in the opposite direction, giving us a few nervous glances over his shoulder.

Firstair was my shortest runway to date at 2,087 feet, and it felt good to reach another small milestone – even if it took a few attempts.

A Prison South of Monroe

From there, I followed the valley south, practicing S-turns and turns around a point. My turns around a point were cut short by increasing gusting winds and turbulence as we got towards the south end of the valley.

Instead we gained a little bit of altitude to practice instrument flight. Today I did a few more recoveries from unusual attitudes and navigated my way back to the Seattle area using just the instruments.

We finished off the day with a few soft field stop-and-goes at Renton before flying back home to Boeing Field.

Seattle From the South End of Lake Washington

Long Final into Renton

On the Glide Slope

Today went much quicker than I’d expected, and I was surprised to find that we’d spent 2.2 hours in the air - my longest flight to date.

Base Leg For a Short Final into Boeing Field

Landing at Boeing Field

An "Experimental" 777 Preparing for Takeoff