Tony... tomorrow night work for you?
(I think you're already talking to Jesse...)
IFR XC to Witchita sounds fun if forecast holds/WX reasonable.
We just got done with two more flights. After looking over the weather we decided local would probably work with no icing below 6000.
Pireps backed that, and a bunch of other data including the Skew-T so we did more approaches here at LNK to start.
If any problems we'd return immediately to LNK. This is the current weather after landing. It was 400 OVC earlier...
Been warming and rising slowly. Continuous light rain with some bands of a little heavier.
This is what it looked like just before the sun went down.
(Sorry crappy iPhone photo from moving car when I ran to grab food at 16:30.)
Continuous mist when we started turning to rain later.
Good news. 79M doesn't leak much if at all. Most Cessnas do.
First flight was more work here at LNK. Radar vectors to the ILS 18, and the ANG tankers were out playing and behind us inbound and I didn't peddle fast enough... so "cancel approach, turn right heading 270 for sequence", no problem.
More practice. I'll putz along at 90 knots thanks.
After that, out to the VOR and hold, then the VOR 17, then Radar vectors to the VOR to fly the LOC 18. Landed.
Jesse was hungry and I'm ridiculously hyper and talkative until my adrenaline comes down inbetween flights, so we made a run to grab him a burger then back up for more.
WX getting better as forecast, but rain getting harder. Full tanks again in case we need options, and off we go...
Jesse went hunting for a VOR/DME since we're non-RNAV, and we wandered over to KCEK.
Clearance Delivery was awesome and again, someone asking in bad weather for an old school DME Arc and asking for Radar Vectors to a radial outbound to one of the non-direct IAFs with the pre-planned expectation that we'd pop back up after a likely missed, woke up the late shift guys. "Cleared to Lincoln airport via radar vectors, maintain 3000."
Then they decided they wanted us West instead of East after we explained how we wanted to get to the East side of the two arcs.
"Amend clearance, fly heading 270 after departure to intercept the radial, maintain 3000."
They've been awesome all week. Lincoln's Approach controllers are over in Omaha so the phone lines were a-buzz -- it took about three go-arounds to figure out what we wanted to do with internal phone tag-ups with Omaha.
Sadly I'm so slow to get set up, it didn't matter. They were waiting on me to get on the runway and movin'.
Got going and the DME arc wasn't too bad. Since my Lightspeed is off for repair, Jesse heard changes in the rain better as we flew along. I finally heard the bigger changes. Looking forward to ANR.
We've learned a very annoying thing about 79M...
Our AI we replaced a couple years ago has a tiny "lean" in level flight (when we first noticed it we both wondered if it was gonna roll over and die) and it almost erects after "leaning" a little to the right after an extended right turn.
Jesse isn't going to let me use it as an excuse, but it's definitely annoying as hell IFR, and you'd never even notice it at all VFR.
It's tiny and subtle except after right turns (holds). You *can* correct for it by watching the DG and TC on roll out but it tricks me constantly as a newbie. It eventually erects in level flight.
Hmm.
(Suck it up wimp!!! Haha.)
Our mechanic likes to set the vacuum regulator slightly below the middle of the green to "save" the gyros. At reduced power to hold 90 knots, vacuum is still in the green but on the low side.
(Maybe this AI just needs more sucking so it doesn't suck?
)
I'm thinking turning it up may help the AI do its thing a little better. Or fail it faster. Who knows?
Anyway, published missed approach at CEK and I finally hit an inbound radial rollout in the hold. That was nice. My holds have been squirrelly.
(Actually everything's been squirrelly. I'm fighting with a weird plateau where something will work great then I'll just lose it completely. Not quite sure what's triggering it. It's almost always a small distraction and a fixation on one instrument or just completely misreading something simple. It's odd. Jesse is very patient with my old, slow, brain.)
Tomorrow morning is looking rough weather-wise, so I'll finally finish up fixing the logbooks and auditing them against LogTen Pro.
Almost done. On to a happy logbook. Never again. Ugh. What a mess. Math errors in 1994 carry forward. Argh! But it's getting fixed and staying fixed.
Other news is I'm here until Sunday now.
WX kept me here and the boss and co-workers graciously said "stay". I reset the extended stay place but gotta call about the rental car.
Logistics.
Bedtime. 0100 and all is well! Maybe see y'all in Kansas tomorrow night...