June 10th 2001 - Ottawa (CYOW) - IFR Training under the hood

A perfect day for flying - not too good for IFR training because there were not clouds ;) So today I had to wear "the Hood" (a vision-restricting cap) that keeps me from looking outside the plane. My trusty GPS logged the track I flew with my instructor giving IFR clearances.

From Ottawa we headed for the YOW VOR (around 10 miles) and were holding there on a 300 radial. The circles in the upper-left are supposed to be nice racetracks ... well, I'm still learning :)

From there we headed for an approach into Gatineau on the north-side of the Ottawa river. The course-reversal on the right could look nicer but considering the strong wind from the nort-west it wasn't too bad.

Then back to Ottawa - at the bottom "YRR" marks the Greely beacon where the approach starts. The "S"-turn course-reversal also doesn't look too impressive but it put us back on the localizer for the ILS 32 approach into Ottawa. And from there it's about following the localizer and glidepath all the way down to 571' - then you get to look outside and look for the runway 8)

I had my minidisc-recoder with me so if you don't mind the size you can download the "black-box's tape" and listen (11 min). I cut the whole 1 hour flight and kept it to the radio-chatter revolving around my flight.

I'm talking to Ottawa Ground, Tower (2 frequencies), Gatineau Radio, Ottawa Tower and again Ground. Also Farz (my instructor) is simulating the IFR-clearances normally encountered in IFR.

I know, I talk too fast - this gives you an idea of what the controllers have to face with me being up there :)

tape.mp3 (1.3MB)

... just click the link if you can play mp3's