It’s been a busy few weeks. I finished my annual King Air C90A recurrent ground school and simulators on Friday, 14 Oct 2011. The very next day, Saturday, I flew to Wichita, and started avionics testing of the latest software version for the Global Vision Flight Deck variant of the Bombardier Global Express on Sunday. It was a productive, very busy week, and I got home on Friday evening.

The weather yesterday was not that great, with lowish clouds, but this morning was a bit better, so I took advantage to do a local flight. I zipped over to Ottawa to do some practice instrument approaches. I’m still experimenting to find the best way to make use of the autopilot during instrument approaches. I did two localizer back course approaches - one was hand flown, and on the other one I used the autopilot. The autopilot cannot couple up to a back course approach, but it can fly a selected track angle using GPS data. It is quite easy to change the desired track angle by one or two degrees to correct for small left or right deviations in the back course. The Trio Autopilot allows the lateral and vertical servos to be used individually, so I manually flew the pitch axis to control the descent while the autopilot handled the lateral servo.

As I was leaving Ottawa on my way back to Smiths Falls, the Ottawa Tower controller commented on how fast the aircraft was (I had the power up, and was doing a bit over 180 kt TAS), and asked how much horsepower the aircraft had.