Last night (this morning?) went pretty well. Having a competent non-flying pilot made a world of difference. It was the sign-off lesson for non-precision approaches, and I didn’t make any mistakes that were too bad. I got behind the airplane at one point. I’d decided to descend, configure the airplane for landing, and execute a tear-drop course reversal for the VOR/DME approach all at once. It turns out that while that might not have been too difficult in the jet, it’s way too much for me to take on at once in Dash. Especially since the instructor had failed the autopilot, so I was hand flying. Had I done things one at a time, it would have been fine. Instead, I bit off a bit more than I could chew, and ended up calling for the flaps while we were going too fast.

The failures are getting a bit more complicated. Shortly after takeoff, I got a caution light for a #1 DC GEN. I figured that was no big deal since we’ve got another DC generator, plus 2 AC generators, and it could probably wait until after we got to a safe altitude, the autopilot on, and so on. I was correct about that, but right as we got to acceleration altitude, I got a DC BUS Caution, immediately followed by a #2 DC GEN, and about 20 other lights. The important thing to note was the DC Bus fault. Along with it, all of my 26V AC powered flight instruments went dark/flagged/kaput. Generally, you have to identify whether it’s a L or R Bus Fault by looking to see which DC Gen went out at the same time–unfortunately I was starting at a #1 AND #2 DC GEN light. Luckily, it only took me a couple of seconds correctly identify it as a Right DC Bus fault that just happened to coincidentally occur right after the #1 DC GEN failure. This is a highly unlikely scenario, but I called for the correct checklists. I did a pretty shoddy job of flying in the clouds while just looking at the standby instruments. Since they’re all on the Captain’s side, it would have made sense to transfer controls over to that side, but fortunately my non-flying pilot got the instruments back online before I killed us, but not before I managed to embarrass myself a bit..

After we finally got those two things sorted out, we had a R TRU HOT. This, in combination with everything else, was proving to be quite the bad electrical day. Fortunately, we got it all sorted out, and I got us on the ground. Hand-flying a non-precision approach down to minimums, of course…. ’cause that’s just how it is in the sim.

We completed the required parts of the lesson with a little time to spare, so I got the inroduction to tonight’s lesson: V1 cuts. I mostly had the callouts, but the yaw is a lot worse than it is in the jet. The good part is that the plane isn’t as scary without swept wings, but with big engines out on the wings, and an unfeathered prop hanging out there, I need just about all the rudder there is to keep the thing pointed straight. We’ll see how I manage to do tonight!

In other news, this was the first day I actually saw the sun in Vancouver. I was started to learn that there’s some awesome mountains to look at—they’ve been cloud-covered since I got here. It’d be great if the weather were nice during my days off next week when Jonah visits, but I’m not holding my breath.