GATTS day 6: building comfort

[ sorry about the gap in posting the rest of my GATTS writeup; I’ve been kinda busy. ]

Day 5 of my GATTS experience was all about refinement. We started in the classroom, where we covered the rules for filing alternate airports and spent a good bit of time on decoding IFR charts (which, luckily, was one of the areas where I worked extra hard when studying for my written). Then we got in the airplane and flew to Topeka to shoot the ILS runway 32 approach, something that Peter told me would almost certainly be featured in my checkride. The GPS in 706 is not equipped with a WAAS-capable GPS, which means that I can’t fly precision GPS approaches. That means that, if I want a precision approach (and who wouldn’t?), it’s the ILS for me, at least until we can upgrade to a newer GP

Of course, one of the most important parts of flying an approach is the missed approach procedure– the sequence of steps you take when, after flying the approach, you’re unable to land because of poor visibility, runway misalignment, and so on. When you’re practicing an approach, it’s common to tell ATC what you’re going to do after the approach– land, execute the published missed approach procedure, or do something else. In our case, we flew the published miss for the ILS 32 approach, which involves flying to the Topeka VOR and then flying a racetrack holding pattern. For a real missed approach, ATC might send you to the normal missed approach holding point, or they might vector you around for another try, depending on the reasons why you went missed.

After the missed, we flew on to Miami County. No, I’d never heard of it either. It turns out that there is a superb BBQ restaurant at the airport, We B Smokin, so after shooting a good GPS approach, we had lunch. I accidentally ordered enough food to feed two normal humans, so by the time we were done eating I was a slow-moving hazard to navigation. We fueled up and departed for Forbes, flew the VOR/DME, and then went back to Manhattan. This was fortuitous timing, because there was a line of thunderstorms poised to attack from the west, so we called it a day and I went to Manhattan’s only movie theater for November Man (pretty decent; worth the $6) and a large bucket of popcorn, followed by watching the storms roll in from the safety of my balcony.

By this point in the training, I was feeling very comfortable operating “in the system”: my radio calls were concise, I was getting better at visualizing what the approach I’d selected would require me to do, and I was much more comfortable with the workload required to brief and set up the approach, then fly it to either a landing or a missed approach. The steady diet of daily flying, in whatever weather we happened to have, was a key part in building my comfort level. Although the flying weather to this point had been pretty good, the stiff, variable winds we had all week were more than enough to challenge me– just what I was looking for.