My experience recording the SKY-1 flight

Post Reply
Keith Smith
Posts: 9939
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2010 8:38 pm
Location: Pompton Plains, NJ
Contact:

My experience recording the SKY-1 flight

Post by Keith Smith »

Although I've used the TOA departure leg several times in other scenarios for other commercial programs, this was my first time tying it together with back to back approaches VNY. Everything went reasonably well until the second approach into VNY. The controller offered a vector onto the base before I was completely finished with the briefing. As a result, I was still working pretty hard when the approach clearance was issued and I managed to overlook the VLOC/GPS setting (toggled with the CDI button on the GPS).

Interestingly, this is known as the 'fail' button by many DPEs who administer IFR check rides as so many candidates blow through the final approach course as a result of having the GPS in the wrong mode. It took a little while to resolve it, but it worked out ok.

This was a great reminder to me of the amount of work associated with shooting back to back approaches (something that you don't often do on normal end to end IFR flights outside of the training environment).
SkyhawkY
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Mar 31, 2020 10:03 am

Re: My experience recording the SKY-1 flight

Post by SkyhawkY »

I'm not sure how to post on this forum but I'm able to enter a reply here. This is in regards to my experience with SKY-1 flights. "Flights" as in two attempts to pass.

I watched the videos and set up trying to use vor navigation and ignore gps, however there is a great opportunity to enter the radial intersection into your Garmin gps at the SMO128 and SLI251 intersection. Ryan Koch explains it very clearly on how to enter it in the Pilot workshops gtn series under useful user waypoints segment: https://pilotworkshop.com/training/gtn-next-level/.
I passed on the second attempt, I'm no more proud of the second attempt than I am of the first failed. You need to be quick on identifying radials on the ILS Z 16R into VNY after the missed and switching from ils to vor to identify the 1.5 dme from vny vor, then a quick intercept of the 152 radial and set up for smo vor and vtu vor which was out of service per a notam.
I could not access the LDA - C plate from the quick access on foreflight, so I had difficulty identifying SILEX and winged it of the depiction from my foreflight ownship and was off by a long shot and failed. Ugh
Second attempt I was able to identify SILEX by using the LAX 316 radial and the MAP from the BUDDE intersection from the VNY 164 radial if you're in the soup.
A lot of button pushing with little time to process which leads to altitude and heading deviations, I'll fly this a few more times off frequency to tighten up the tolerances.
I avoided the SKY ratings because I found this first one too intimidating, rightfully so, it still is. It's an excellent exercise in exposure to SOCAL environment, gps programing and foreflight programing using the radial intersection of two vor's.

So my lesson from this was to learn the radials you need to intersect on the brief, process them and have them setup before entering the approach. This flight has quite a few radials to intersect and 5 airports to review notams on, not including the alternate, which is always a good thing to file, so at least 6 airports! TOR, SLI, VNY, BUR, VTU and the alternate...
Post Reply