What's new
Van's Air Force

Don't miss anything! Register now for full access to the definitive RV support community.

expanding personal minimums

airguy

Unrepentant fanboy
Sponsor
I had a good opportunity to kill two proverbial birds with one stone this weekend.

Flying for about six months now with my IFR ticket, I have seized every opportunity to get in actual conditions and shoot approaches, but the lowest I had done was several at 500' and one at 400'. I haven't had an opportunity to get lower simply because I wanted an "out" to bail out to with better conditions the first few times I tried it, and each time we had really low ceilings around here it was widespread low ceilings. Saturday was a perfect mix, with 300' and 2 at Abilene where the EAA 471 chapter was putting on a pancake breakfast. Midland was 400' and 5 and improving, with 1200' and 10 forecast in 3 hours, so I felt pretty happy with that. I loaded 5 hours of fuel onboard and launched with a phone-file from my private strip and shot the RNAV 35R into Abilene down to 300' and arguably 2-3 miles visibility in mist, had a good breakfast with EAA 471 and launched IFR back to Midland afterward. Everything worked just it was supposed to and I was pretty comfortable with it.

There were about 50-60 people there and I was the only idiot that flew in with the low weather. :D One guy looked at me when I was telling about it, looked outside at the low clouds, looked back at me and said "You did WHAT now?"

Kudos to 471 for a great breakfast and good storytelling, I'll be back!
 
Very cool Greg. Way to utilize that ticket. I plan on doing the same and getting IFR current again too. It might be with foggles. Hard to get those conditions here in the Southwest though.
 
Nice going, Greg. Now, if you?re so inclined, use the same ?little bit at a time? approach to work your way down to visibilities less than 1 and/or night. This is, unfortunately, very hard to simulate.
 
I've been continuing to expand my personal minimum envelope and have gotten a fair amount of actual in the last 6 months in the process, pretty much every time the weather was "Ducks ain't even going up..." I was at the hangar doing a preflight.

So today was complete junk in the west Texas area, and predictably I was going flying. I managed to get 1 legitimate real missed approach at 300/1 minimums on the RNAV 25 at KMDD, then a couple breakouts at about 100-200 feet above minimums at KODO and KMAF, and another breakout just above minimums to full stop at KMDD.

oJU.png


We stopped for a bit to recycle a cup of used coffee, then filed IFR to KSJT for lunch and shot an ILS down to legit minimums at 200/1, and that was probably the most fun of all.

oJZ.png


After lunch we did an IFR departure and the weather was clean at home so we cancelled halfway and proceeded to have fun. Life is good.

I've managed to work myself down to real minimums, and even legit missed approaches at minimums, and feel good about it. I'm ahead of the airplane and ready for the Plan B/Plan C decision and I'm having more fun doing it than should be legal. Why didn't I do this 10 years ago???
 
Last edited:
Back
Top