Overall, it went okay. Our instructor was unable to get on the earlier flight from Phoenix, so he didn’t get to the sim until about 2345. That still gave us an hour to brief. My sim partner and I went to the sim location early, in hopes of finding a procedures trainer where we could practice callouts beforehand. Partner had clearly not done much effective studying, so it ended up being a couple hours of me teaching him.

I elected to fly first. Normally, the person who flies second has an advantage, because you get to learn from the mistakes the first guy made. In this case, I was worried that if Partner went first, that we’d spend the whole time stuck on the ground.

I discovered immediately that my basic instrument skills were worse than rusty. Fortunately, I used to be a pilot, so my abilities are coming back. The Dash controls are really heavy, and it’s incredibly sensitive in pitch, but rolls like a pig. I did some turns, climbs and descents without the auto pilot to get a feel for it, then we went right into the stall series. They were to standards on my first attempt, which is much better than I managed on the jet. After that, a couple of ILS approaches to landings in Memphis. There were a few malfunctions, but being the first day they were all pretty easy things like deice malfunctions, or fuel filter bypass indications. The last approach terminated in a miss, which went okay.

I was surprised at the number of little bitty things from the CRJ that I missed. Things like the autopilot controls in the jet all have clicking detents. So if you want to turn a heading bug 1 degree left, you turn the knob one click left. The Dash doesn’t have any clicks, so I wasted a lot of time trying to get things pointed in the correct direction.

The big thing it’s missing, though, is the moving map. In the CRJ, there’s a map that shows the aircraft’s position relative to the currently-important navigational aids. This is nice in a missed approach, where it’s hard to keep your head around a complicated series of things that you’re only going to do if you don’t get to land.

Other quirks: The airspeed indicator is not at all intuitive and reminds me of the one in T-37. The control wheel is enormous compared to the one in the CRJ, and it feels like it’s in the wrong place. The landings are straight forward enough, and the approaches are nice and slow so I’ve got time to watch it all happen. In a lot of ways, that’s been my saving grace: I’m used to how fast things happen in a jet, and the slowness of the turboprop helps out.

I was still very overwhelmed, but it was nowhere near as bad as my first lesson on the jet. Now that I’ve been through it once, I have confidence that I’ll be able to handle it as I get there. I’m still pretty nervous about single engine procedures, but we don’t actually get to those until Lesson 5.

Tonight is basically the same stuff we did last night, only it’s a “sign off” lesson, which means I need to be able to do everything I learned last night to standards. I’m not anticipating too much of a problem.

I went to sleep around 6am, and unfortunately woke up to a fire alarm at about 1:20pm. I felt well rested when I woke up–not sure how I’ll be doing tonight.