A little left-seat right-seat

Plane: Cessna 172
Route: 40I, Local 
Weather: Scattered clouds, 85 degrees, wind 270 degrees at 9 knots gusting to 18

Jamie needed to shoot a few approaches and holds to maintain his instrument currency and I was up for the task, so we decided to go flying this evening. I beat him to the airport (he had to drop his son off at practice) so I preflighted the plane, fueled up, and - since he still wasn't there - took it around the patch once before he hopped onboard. With strong winds right down the runway, I set up for a short field landing with all 40 degrees of flaps and was stopped roughly 600 feet after touching down on the grass. Not bad!

Back to the safety piloting... Jamie climbed onboard and into the right seat. He's a CFI and he decided to do all the hood work from that side of the instrument panel. I took off and headed west as he put on the hood and flipped through his charts. Or whatever the equivalent of "flipping through" is called on an iPad.

We exchanged controls and he went to work - shooting approaches into both runways at Wright Brothers and then doing some holds over top of Stewart. The GPS in the 172 has been a bit flaky as of late. I've never had issues with it on an XC but it loses signal or otherwise fails intermittently when an approach is active. Obviously that wouldn't be so hot in actual instrument conditions. They're aware of it and the plane shall be visiting the avionics shop soon.

Hood work complete, Jamie handed the controls back to me over the airport and I flew south, did a steep spiral to very quickly descend from 2,500 to 1,800 feet, and entered the pattern. I pulled the power abeam the numbers for a simulated engine-out landing. The touchdown was nice and smooth, one of my better recent attempts in the Skyhawk. Whether as student or co-pilot, it's always nice to fly with Jamie and tonight was no exception.

Flight Track: Google Earth KMZ File 
Today's Flight: 1.5 hours
Total Time: 273.2 hours