While my flight instructor Martin and I were working with the autopilot last weekend, we also spent some time working on flying with a partial panel. This practice is intended to simulate the failure of one or more instruments on the panel. For this particular “failure,” we simulated losing the directional gyro and attitude indicator by applying round covers that obscured the instrument faces. These are gyroscopic instruments that rely on a vacuum pump to operate, so we were essentially simulating a vacuum pump failure.
I topped off a busy work week with a busy weekend of air work. On Saturday afternoon we departed San Carlos for Salinas to do the Localizer DME runway 31 approach, my first with a DME arc. We had practiced DME arcs the previous weekend out in the central valley well away from any significant terrain. As you can see from the approach plate, that isn’t the case with this approach.
Last Sunday’s flight was a real workout including holding patterns, DME arcs an approach to Tracy (KTCY) and Los Banos (KLSN). The biggest lesson of the day was to brief the approach before flying the approach. Martin was playing the role of air traffic control while I was under the hood. After vectoring out of San Carlos, he had me cross TRACY intersection at 3,500’ and proceed direct OMWAP for the RNAV (GPS) Rwy 26 approach.
