building time

So as of now I am about a quarter of the way done with the flying portion of the instrument rating. My instructor and I have been doing nothing but x-country flights (50nm straight line distance) under the hood. The simulated instrument time is building and I am slowly getting to where I need to be. The ground portion however is going even faster. For school I must finish by next week. I am doing this all on my own this time around and it has turned out to be OK, but I am still a little nervous about what I am going to get on the written.

The flying has been great! Well that is minus being under the hood all the time. I have been getting lots of practice with VOR/DME approaches, intercepting and tracking airways, navigating via the ADF, VOR, and GPS, getting all the new radio lingo down, flying in different types of weather, and well... flying only by reference to instruments. It has been pretty fun over all. I am flying a ton! Ultimately building time towards the magical 250 hours. I have been flying with much stronger winds than I did with my private. My confidence is growing and routinely seem to be flying in winds upwards of 20kts. Crosswind landings seem to be a regular occurrence, and I actually logged a minuscule amount of actual IMC yesterday flying around in the clouds and rain. It was a good day as the wind was right down the runway at 14kts gusting to 19kts. It was my first really nice landing in a week or two. Kissed the numbers with the stall horn itching to blow, and off the runway onto taxiway bravo which is around 1500 ft from the threshold. I thought it was nice anyway. Certainly better than Florida senator Richard Steinberg's landing which I watched from the hold short line. We counted 7 bounces (a few pretty hard) as he tried to land our schools glass cockpit 182. I felt bad for the plane.... it wasn't pretty.

That's it for now. I have tons of work to do for the written and I got to get crackin' on that asap. Keep the blue side up.