The year ended in a somewhat challenging manner and—while nowhere near the previous one when my wings were clipped—convoluted enough to keep me from getting bored. Weather, a lengthy annual inspection, and crunched tail feathers kept me on the ground but I passed the demonic IFR written and was back to some serious practical test preparation by August.
“Piece of cake,” I thought. I’d been rated since the late ’60s and logged plenty of time “cloud flying.” But, like some of you, I wasn’t brought up on the new generation of avionics and sophisticated nav equipment. And my 180 has no autopilot or even so much as a heading bug on the directional gyro. Its avionics consist of an elderly BendixKing KX-155 and a Garmin 430. Yeah, I use ForeFlight but it can be a struggle. There were times I was tempted to placard the 430 “inop,” leave the iPad at home, and stick to ILS, localizer, and VOR approaches.
