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. 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!
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. 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!