The best instructor I ever had for this stuff was way up in the “Bob Hover” class. He could take an aircraft so smoothly into some of the strangest places that when it was your turn to straighten things out, it was very hard to believe and your senses absolutely did not believe what your instruments are saying.
He could so fool my brain that even when I took the hood off, the world would shift before my eyes as my brain was so convinced of what it expected to see.
Anywho, Three airplanes were doing the race track over Topeka Kansas one morning trying to get in. ( We were stacked up at different altitudes on a published holding pattern that looks like a race track ) We were all in the clear 800 feet or better above the overcast that went all the way to the ground.
We were all fat on fuel so we kept making approaches. I was on my third try when I got partial ground contact. I let my eyes come up for the briefest glimpse. ( bad bad bad ) and I was convinced that I needed to make a sharp correction to the right to align with the runway. ( wrong wrong wrong ) and I actually started to do that before I went back on the gages. ( no copilot or passenger pilot to help )
So, by the time I had gotten the aircraft ( Aero Star 601 ) back to proper attitude, I had gone right down to a itty bit under minimums and the runway popped back into to view. But now I was off center and departing from it even more. I had sufficient room to get it all back under control and make the landing.
Had I not had the recurrent application of this instructors sneaky ways to convince me that I had to always fly the instruments no matter what my senses were telling me, much less my eyes, I would have probably not faired so well.
The number of full mental changes I had to deal with in a few seconds and the amount of information that needed processing each time was an important lesson on how much and how dangerous it is to be thinking about the wrong things while flying.
That last change from instrument flight to visual flight and having the aircraft a little crossed up when it did not feel like it, made for some fancy foot work to get things aligned.
Within 20 minutes all three of us were down as the conditions were slowly improving.
Non stressful to the aircraft ways to recover from unusual attitudes is very important, especially for instrument flight. Over stressing the aircraft is a very real possibility and it usually is not necessary.
But you have to practice, practice, practice, …
So tell us all you did on Saturday…
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