Time for more simulated instrument conditions! After just over a month since my last flight, I was expecting to be a bit rusty. Because we were just doing instrument stuff, it didn't matter if we flew at night, so I was able to work in a weekday flight. I had a bit of apprehension about doing a night landing after a month of not flying at all, but the entire flight—including the landing—was incredibly smooth.

The weather was perfect; totally clear, almost no wind, bright moon, and snow on the ground so that the ground was easy to see. The plan was to fly out to the southeast practice area, do some instrument maneuvers, unusual attitude recoveries, then fly an instrument approach into SAF just for fun.

As soon as I got us about 500' above runway 20, I put on the Foggles and they wouldn't come off until I was at minimums on the approach to land. I was surprised at how well I was able to handle the instrument maneuvers and recoveries; it went much better than my last two instrument flights. One key thing on the unusual attitude recoveries was looking first at the artificial horizon to gauge the "am I going up or down?" question that must first be answered before knowing the proper sequence of recovery procedures. In the past I think I was using the altimeter for this, which is a bit slower to grok. Anyway, this time it went really well. We did quite a few recoveries, then headed in for the instrument approach.

We did the VOR/DME-A approach starting from the wrong side of the airport, so I got to work on some VOR navigation to get from wherever I was (had no idea, since I'd been under the hood since we started and had no GPS) to the MITUM intersection north of SAF. From there, we did a [very ugly, see GPS track. It was my first one, give me a break, jerk.] procedure turn onto the SAF 158° radial which took me right in to the airport. Michael acted as second pilot, handling the radio work and chart understanding. He just told me what distances to look for on the DME, what VOR radials to use, etc. So I concentrated on the instrument maneuvers portion of the show. When we got down to 4.3 nm from the VOR and 7,000', which was our designated minimum, he told me to rip off the foggles and take a look. We were right over the airport, couldn't miss it! Instrument approaches are hereby declared to be very cool.

I'm really looking forward to doing instrument training.

The landing was a bit odd because instrument minimums put you a bit lower than pattern altitude, and it was nighttime, so I ended up being a bit fast and high on final, but overall it went well. A bit flat, but totally acceptable. After we got the plane tied down, we talked for awhile about the remainder of my flight training which is now in the home stretch, and what will come after that.

:-D