Instrument Lesson #1: Under the Hood

I had my first instrument lesson on Friday night. 1ZM remains down for G1000 fixes and its annual, so I flew 9DS. Not a lot to report—straight and level, turns, climbs, descents, turning climbs, turning descents. I did well, even when Alex started making me handle dialing the radios. My next lesson will be more of the same, with the addition of map reading, VOR tuning, intercept planning, and the like to distract me and start developing my positional awareness.

I’ve been using X-Plane to practice my instrument skills in the evenings. I’ve been concentrating on random instrument failures so that my scan doesn’t grow too reliant on any particular instruments. It also makes me diagnose and handle instrument failures. Of course, I’m flying a Cessna with steam gauges in X-Plane, so the system failures are traditional rather than the kind I’m likely to experience with a G1000.

I have the G1000 simulator from Garmin, but I can’t run it under VMware or Parallels on my Mac mini, so I’m trying Boot Camp later tonight. In the mean time, I’m making steady progress through the G1000 book and software. The software is just an abridged narration of the book, but well done. (Those of you who are Web developers may be interested to learn that the software appears to be written in Adobe Flex.) If computer- or Web-based training is more your speed than reading, I recommend the software.

In other news, I’m learning Morse Code to make VOR identification easier—and because I’ve always wanted to learn it. I picked up a program (PC only, unfortunately) that uses the Koch training method. I’m training at 25 words per minute and only have 3 letters so far. Fun, fun.

On top of all of that, I’m reading the Jepp and Machado books. So far, I’m shocked to say that I find the Jepp book much better. Also, on your advice, I picked up the King DVDs and will work my way through those some time “soon”.