Preflight

I remember the flight like it was yesterday. While home from college I had gone to visit a childhood friend in Rochester, New York, seizing on what I saw as a perfect opportunity to fly. I rented an old Cessna Skyhawk with dual navigation radios and no approach-certified GPS, given that they were still relatively new.

The trip from Wellsville in the southern tier of New York was in clear blue skies, but the flight back proved to be something else altogether. After filing IFR I took off from Rochester International Airport and climbed above a heavily scattered layer of fair-weather cumulus clouds. The flight home was only going to take about 40 minutes, which allowed me a little time to settle in and enjoy the view as the scattered layer became broken, and then overcast. Thirty miles north of Wellsville it was clear that I was going to have to make an instrument approach.

Air traffic control descended me from 6,000 feet down to 4,000 feet, which put me right above the cloud layer. After I briefed the approach and got mentally prepared to fly the procedure, I looked outside and took a minute to fully soak in what was happening and enjoy my last moments of sunshine. On a VFR flight, the solid cloud deck would have been a worrisome proposition, a position with no option to land for 40 miles. But since this was an instrument flight, I was confident of my place in the world and simply blown away by the beauty of skating along the top of the clouds. In fact, 4,000 feet, the initial altitude for the approach, turned out to be as close to clouds as one could get without actually being in them. The image of a flying carpet is reserved for days like this.

Now cleared for the approach, I dipped my wing in the clouds as I turned onto the localizer course, and then descended. After passing the final approach point, I descended further and broke out below the clouds comfortably above the minimum descent altitude. I don’t remember the landing, but so long as it was safe, I didn’t care—I had flown my first solo instrument approach.

Many pilots talk fondly of their first solo flight, but for me that first solo approach was the seminal moment in my early flying. I was enthralled by the idea that I had flown between two airports, navigating only by needles in a cockpit. Descending into the clouds, I had a small amount of doubt in the back of my mind that the airport would materialize in the windscreen as I expected it to. It turned out to be a needless thought, as my shaky faith in the system was rewarded with the beautiful sight of a long, thin piece of concrete below the overcast.

As an instructor, I can appreciate how beneficial that first solo instrument experience was, and what a positive effect it had on my flying. I was in the clear, but couldn’t navigate via ground references, and then flew an actual approach well above minimum altitudes. But sometimes we aren’t so lucky, as Dan Namowitz describes in this month’s cover story, “IFR and IMC,” beginning on page 18. In the story Namowitz details a number of strategies for safely introducing progressively more challenging experiences. The stepping-stone process is one of the key factors in getting an instrument rating that many reasons a pilot ciertificate or new rating is often referred to as a “license to learn.” May you use your certificate as such and build great experience safely.

I’d like to thank those CFIs who took time out of their busy schedules at AOPA Aviation Summit in Tampa last November to attend our annual roundtable. Thirty CFIs from around the country discussed the important issues that affect their flight schools and students.

Among the many topics we touched on, keeping students, the use of simulators, and LSAs were the most poignant for me. The consensus? Well, there really wasn’t any. Most in the room were still curious about the business case for LSAs, but skeptical of their ability to handle the rigors of training. On the use of simulation, there was some agreement as to its effectiveness, although most were pragmatic about it from a customer standpoint. The customer wants to fly, they said, and although a simulator might be a good learning tool, it’s firmly planted on the ground.

The most intriguing part of the discussion centered around retaining students. One flight school operator in Florida trains each new CFI to a standard in both the classroom and the airplane, they work in teams, and each Monday the staff gets together to monitor the progress of every student. The result is nearly no attrition, an amazing feat in flight training, and proof that good business sense does carry over to flight schools.

E-mail Ian J. Twombly, deputy editor of AOPA Flight Training.