Flight Log 2010-07-15

Instrument practice with a safety pilot. Temp 29°C, wind 220@06, alt 30.08, hazy and hot. I was originally going to go "in the system" and do some practices into KLCK or KCMH, but when I looked at the NOTAMs, the glide slope was out of service at LCK, one of the runways was closed for a few hours at CMH, the APE VOR is still out of service (though the TACAN should be back in at the end of the month), so I decided to do the ILS22 @ ZZV including the DME arc (it has been years since I did one of those) and the full missed approach procedure including hold, then another ILS22, then the GPS27 back into VTA. By that time, I was starting to get nauseated and was very hot, so I called it a day there. It was clear that I need more practice. I hand flew everything, my scan was pretty sad, I failed to hold altitude a couple of times and heading a few more. On the approaches themselves, I didn't go full deflection, but I did over-correct a few times. Had it been actual conditions at my personal minimums, I would have gotten in, and I didn't bust anything so bad that I would have failed an IPC or checkride, but I must get more practice before I fly again in (hard) actual IMC.

Flight Log 2010-06-29, etc.

Tuesday was a very busy day, but one of the results was a successfully completed flight review. My hour of ground was actually kind of fun. Harold had a couple of quizzes for me that I did pretty well on and we reviewed some of the FAR/AIM that I haven't looked at recently. Then we went out for some air work. Temp was 22°C, altimeter 30.03, wind at the surface was reported as 070@06, but was closer to a 90° crosswind as we got going and about 100 feet up it was probably closer to 20 knots. We did the GPS27 approach and circle to land on runway 9, then actually ended up spending most of the hour on crosswind landings (which is not a bad way to spend an hour). One thing I discovered is that I'm much more comfortable landing (or taking off) with a crosswind from the right than I am with one from the left, so it was good practice with this one coming from the left. Ended up with exactly the required 1.0 on the Hobbs, so I've jumped through that hoop for the FAA and I'm good for another two years.

Tuesday was also Erin's 22nd birthday and my parents had called the previous week to say they were bringing my nephew up to visit Cincinnati, so we all went to see the Reds play at Great American Ballpark. It was a pretty good game, but not the outcome I would have preferred. Joey Votto hit a 3-run homer in the bottom of the 9th to tie the game, but then Arthur Rhodes had his first bad outing really of the season and gave up 3 runs without retiring a batter in the top of the 10th, so the Reds lost to the Phillies (I suppose my baby sister was probably happy about that). Oh, well. So, all-in-all, a mostly enjoyable day. We did the traditional birthday meal at a (new) Japanese steakhouse on Wednesday instead and that was also nice.

On Wednesday, I finally (after 6 years) got my online logbook working the way I had envisioned it from the beginning, so it now pulls from the database dynamically rather than just showing static pages that I had to manually update everytime I updated the database. Unfortunately, I haven't configured the widget at the left here to do so yet, maybe next year.