Instrument Written Holding Question

[olasek]

using formulas and circles and what not just make a simple matter confusing IMO

Confusing and dangerous ... I rather enter hold in a slightly sloppy manner than while playing with templates, compass, circles, straight edges lose control of the aircraft in IMC.

 

[poadeleted20]

Ether of the two planes I fly would, GNS with Stec and GPSS, and GNS with KFC 325 and GPSS.

..as would most good IFR rigs.

That may be your definition of "good IFR rigs", but it's not universally true (not even close) and as I said, a gust of wind at the right point can change the answer even with those.

 

[James331]

That may be your definition of "good IFR rigs", but it's not universally true (not even close) and as I said, a gust of wind at the right point can change the answer even with those.

So you'd consider a century A/P a good IFR (as in night IMC, single pilot) autopilot?

 

[poadeleted20]

So you'd consider a century A/P a good IFR (as in night IMC, single pilot) autopilot?

Most of them, yes, I would. You do know there are about ten different Century autopilots out there, some of them extremely sophisticated, right? For example, having flown with both, I'd certainly say that a Century 41 is a lot more suitable autopilot for SPIFR than an S-Tec 20 (you having stated you think an S-Tec is suitable for that). OTOH, you could not even begin to compare a Century I with an S-Tec 55X for that use. So, it's not about who built the autopilot, but rather about the capabilities and limitations of the particular unit under discussion. In any event, even with the most sophisticated autopilot including GPSS, it would not at all be unlikely when flying the depicted missed approach on autopilot to have the Garmin command a parallel entry -- BTDT, with all sorts of autopilots.

 

[denverpilot]

I'm not so sure about that. I got, and posted about one that was not in any of the study materials so I assume it was new. It was about instrument currency requirements and was so confusingly worded, and the only choices that weren't obviously wrong had such utterly stupid, ambiguous wording involving "required iterations and repetitions" that I ended up just giving up and guessing. I got it wrong, of course, though I think I understand the currency requirements pretty well. Questions worded so that you have to be a code-breaker to decipher them seem to be something the FAA cranks out quite regularly and, I can only assume, quite intentionally, up until at least two years ago. I doubt they've changed their ways since, though I'd love to be proved wrong on that.

There's been a push recently to add new questions and keep them from being gathered by the test prep folk, so you're probably right.

The quality of those questions appears to be a crappy as the ones that hung out in the pool forever and were scored as "gimmes".

Nothing about that seems to ever change.