© C Blythe 2004

The West Coast Adventure is billed as the ultimate IFR experience and for me it lived up to that billing. We travelled nearly 5,000 miles in 7 days encountering most things that an instrument pilot is likely to come across.

However let’s go to the start. In January 2004, I had just arrived back from Florida with my Night Qualification and was thinking about what next. The what next was a FAA Instrument Rating. But why?  I had decided that IMC was not for me when I did my IMC rating some 13 years ago and let it lapse without ever renewing it. I cannot remember exactly how I came across the WCA.

I was looking up IFR training with Google and this one kept coming up. It also kept appearing in other web sites, and had featured in AOPA magazine. So I was persuaded to look it up. With the requirement to have done the training syllabus before starting the WCA, it looked just the thing to complement an IMC rating. Besides, from what I had seen of many of the full time IR programmes in the usual places, they involved two students going out and sharing the time and practicing the approaches themselves, not something I fancied doing. If you doubt what i say look at some of the websites and compare the instructor hours with the total hours flown. if you are flying with an instructor then who are you flying with? One well known school has 40 hours of flight time and 25 hours of instruction!

It is true to say I fell in love with the idea immediately and compared to flogging around Florida for a couple of weeks there was non. Besides, the programme had a degree of consistency about it. Three hundred people had done the trip, so in my mind these people knew what they were doing.

I emailed a few of the references put forward. No one was critical and in fact a couple of guys had done the trip twice. There were also a couple of write ups of trips on the web site too which were a “slam dunk” in making up my mind. My only challenge was to persuade the family to let me go to the US for 2 weeks on my own to fly. As I was approaching my 50^th Birthday, I pleaded the landmark in my life case. To my surprise I got the green light.

Next I got in touch with Field Morey. By chance he had just completed a trip with another Brit, David. So I contacted David and after speaking to him I was sending off my deposit for the September trip. At the time the dollar was crashing and at $1.90 to the pound, I bought all my remaining dollars to pay for the rest of the trip and got myself a bargain.

[Home] [Contents] [Introduction] [Preparation] [Arrival] [Day 1] [Day 2] [Day 3] [Day 4] [Day 5] [Day 6] [Day 7] [Day 8] [Day 9] [The Checkride 1] [The Checkride 2] [Conclusions] [Photo Gallery] [Links]