Learning Everything from Scratch

Today I flew my second instrument lesson. No clouds to hide in this time, so I had to wear a pair of Foggles (aka. View Limiting Device, aka. IFR Hood).
It basically limits my outside view so I can only see the instruments in the plane.

I did basically all of the same maneuvers as before; slow flight, stalls, climbs and descents, and standard rate turns. I also did steep turns as well.

Steep turns were especially difficult for me to do. Even flying visually, steep turns were difficult. Now they are even harder with no reference to the actual horizon. Its like I'm learning everything all over again.

Basically in order for me to do these maneuvers correctly, I have to develop a scan. There are six pertinent instruments I need to focus on:




Airspeed Indicator - My speed through the air (Top Left)
Attitude Indicator - My artificial horizon (Top Middle)
Altimeter - Shows me my altitude (Top Right)
Turn Coordinator - Shows direction and quality of a turn (Bottom Left)
Heading Indicator - Shows my current directional heading (Bottom Middle)
Vertical Speed Indicator - Shows the speed at which I climb or descend. (Bottom Left)

Because I'm new at instrument flying, I have a tendency to omit certain instruments from my scan. For instance, during a steep turn, I'm too focused on maintaining 45 degrees of bank that I neglect my altimeter and I lose altitude.

When I take my instrument checkride in the distant future, I probably won't actually do any of these maneuvers. The only reason I'm doing them now is to help develop my scan. Eventually, when I start flying approaches under the hood, I will have to add the localizer and glide slope to my scan as well. Tricky...

We returned to the airport and I decided that now was a good time to take my fiance Kala up to be my first official passenger as a private pilot. She was terrified, but she had fun. We basically flew out to Tygart Lake for a few minutes and then came back. She took a series of videos on her cell phone of the flight:









The camera shaking on that last video is due to the bad shimmy dampener on the airplane. A bad shimmy dampener basically allows the nose wheel to shake and vibrate out of control when pressure is put on it (typically when using the brakes).

Well, that was my second instrument flight (plus thirty minutes of fun flying).