It's been a little over a month since my last flight (in a Citabria) and I had a little time yesterday so I decided to do another instrument training flight and get some XC time (cross country). We took a 172 with a KLN-94 GPS and KMD 550 MFD. We flew from KJYO (Leesburg, Va) and took the GPS Y 21 approach into KCHO (Charlottesville, Va). This was my first GPS approach and we had the autopilot fly it which was pretty neat. I'm used to flying VFR straight in to runway 21 but the GPS approach had us hold at the WITTO intersection and then angle in via the ECEUS and MUSOJ intersections so you actually come in at an angle to miss the little hill on the left before the runway. One thing that I'm beginning to realize is that if you are in actual instrument conditions (meaning you can't see very far), if you see the runway environment when you reach the minimum altitude you are going to be very close to the airport and you will probably have to drop your flaps right away, slow down and descend quickly to land. I can understand how stressful instrument flying can be.
From there we went up the CLADD intersection and took the ILS 32 approach into KOKV (Winchester).
After KOKV we headed back to KJYO and were done for the day.
I did notice one thing about flying using the autopilot. It's easy to stop paying attention and just mess with the GPS or just look around and forget simple things like throttle back when you reach your cruise altitude because the autopilot is doing most of that for you (I was trying the autopilot fixed rate of climb coupled with the altitude arm mode meaning it would climb at a particular rate and then level off automatically at a set altitude).
All in all it was another fun and learning filled day.
My totals so far are:
| land | sel | xc | night |
| 250 | 126.6 | 28.6 | 11.4 |
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