Last week, I had an itch to fly and found Milton was interested in doing the same. He really wanted to shoot some approaches, so we formulated a plan to meet at Old Bridge and shoot them in Gigi. After encountering some rude transient pilots who decided to park two airplanes so as to block the pumps and then proceed to sit and chat for a while, we fueled up and headed north.
Milton had his iPad on his kneeboard and was trying to get used to it when, with his head down, he entered a 30 degree banked turn and started letting the nose fall. I let it go until he caught the fact that something was amiss, and corrected the problem. Shortly after that, he removed the iPad and used my laptop for the charts. The difference is that my laptop is at eye level whereas his iPad was on his knee.
I vectored him onto the ILS at Orange County (MGJ) and he let the autopilot fly the approach for the first one. A lovely approach right down to minimums and he went missed, though I could see the runway for the entire approach. The second one was another ILS but handflown down to minimums. Third was the same. On the fourth one, I gave him a partial panel and he shot it better than the other two!
So enough with the ILSes, we go missed and up into the hold over Huguenot VOR (HUO). Milton executed a beautiful teardrop entry and held perfectly. Then I cleared him for the VOR 8 approach.
The VOR 8 into MGJ has a few stepdown fixes that have DME distances from HUO. The DME in Gigi has a switch which allows the REMOTE frequency to come from either the Nav 1 or Nav 2 radio. Milton forgot to switch this and was using DME from Sparta VOR instead of Huguenot. Normally the mistake would've been clearly displayed on the GPS/Laptop, but by strange occurrence, the plate wasn't properly calibrated. This meant the little airplane depicted on the screen wasn't where we actually were, and, in fact was miles behind us.
DME reading was 21NM when we started the approach (from overhead HUO). It climbed up to 23 when Milton next checked it. Milton was looking for a DME of 9 before leaving 2800', which he never got because the DME frequency was wrong. The little airplane showed us outside of the 9DME fix the entire time, and never moved any closer to it. To his credit, he never descended and realized something was amiss and was trying to resolve it but couldn't before I ended the situation.
The funniest part of the night was during this whole episode when Milton asked me, "Do you ever think they'll approve handhelds for full IFR use." My reply was "No way, because look, there you are over Orange County and the laptop shows you back about 8 miles west of here!."
The night was finished off with another VOR 8, just to make it right, two excellent night landings at MGJ, a flight down the Hudson corridor and a 3rd night landing at Old Bridge.
