Review

June 6, 2012

I arrive at the airport on a beautiful, cool, calm morning. The airplane has been calling my name for days, so I'm quick to perform my preflight inspection. I'm back in my favorite C172.

I meet up with my instructor, Mark. He refers to our syllabus and lets me know what the plan for today is. Holds, holds, holds, and some approaches. The school's Chief CFI said that Alton's NDB approach was back up and running again. It's a type of approach that's rare to find, which means I've never been able to do one. Mark said we would give it a shot.

We depart from Runway 9 and head northeast. We tune to the NDB frequency and watch the instrument to determine if it's in service. After five minutes of it not working, Mark cancels the plan and tells me to fly to Spirit Airport instead. Due to the last minute change, I had to quickly reprogram the radio frequencies. After listening to Spirit's weather, I contact STL Approach and give them my intentions.

The controller vectors around to set us up for the ILS 8R. As we get closer, we're told that he needs to give aircraft separation between us and another plane inbound. He gives them the right of way and makes us wait. The controller had basically made up a holding pattern for us, but instead of us doing it without help, he gave us the turn by turn directions. Finally after what seemed like 10 minutes, he gets us on course for the approach. I haven't done an approach in a while, so I was hoping I'd do it right.

I interpret the instrument to guide me straight to the runway. I was a little late on starting my descent, but when I was at the missed approach point, I looked up and it was spot on. I gave myself a pat on the back and started my climb. We notify Approach that we went missed and want vectors to set us up for an approach back into our home airport. He tells us to climb to 3,500ft and cleared to enter Bravo airspace.

His instructions take us right towards Lambert Airport. Flying here always feels like a forbidden place. It gets my adrenaline pumping. While en route, the controller contacts us, "6-5-1-Niner-1, ummm I just wanted to let you know that there will be two F16s taking off from Lambert shortly and will be headed straight out." I jumped with excitement. Mark took notice and told me I could take my foggles off to watch the show.

Once we passed Lambert, we were directed to fly into Illinois. We kept a north heading while waiting for the controller to give us our next set of directions. He was supposed to set us up for an approach into St. Charles. He comes back on over the radio and tells us that he was flying us in the wrong direction. We had 15 minutes left of our lesson, which didn't give us enough time to practice holds or even the approach. We canceled with ATC and flew straight home. I let Mark do the landing today... just because.

Since we ran out of time, I need to go back up again to finish what we couldn't get to. Then I hope to get the signoff for the Stage 2 Check.