Polishing

Now we come to the most painful phase of the training – polishing the skills to get ready for the checkride. Not that flying of any kind is boring, mind you, but being under the hood tightening up things that you already know about doesn’t exactly rank as “exciting”.

So we went up for some airwork today. Started out with something I haven’t actually done under the hood yet (although I did them plenty without the hood for my private license) which was steep turns. A bit rusty at first – rolling in and out wasn’t smooth enough – but other than that they were OK. Then a hold over at Fillmore, which went fine. Then came unusual attitudes – fine again. Feeling pretty good, but not good enough to do an intersection hold. We’ll save that for next time. We shot the ILS coming home, which went well, considering the confusion on the radio. A jet and a twin behind me ended up putting me on the left (non-ILS) runway, so Kent had to vector me to the runway. I held the glideslope well, so that was good.