Actual!

Today, I got about 0.5hrs of actual IFR! It was my ninth IFR lesson, and we went flying through a blustery spring afternoon. Winds were pretty gusty and brisk today, winds at 280@9 gusting to 18 as I left Coshocton. The ceiling was fairly high, with an overcast layer at around 4000ft, but it was gusty. Since I wanted to do a little longer training flight to really get some different approaches under my belt, we planned a flight from Newark to Delaware, OH (KDLZ), then to Marion, OH (KMNN), then to Mansfield (KMFD), and finally back to Newark. We took off and headed towards Delaware, and immediately ran into some rainstorms. We vectored around the worst of it, but we were definitely NOT VFR, which was pretty cool. It was a very challenging day to fly, perhaps the most challenging that I have ever flown. There was a lot of windshear and updrafts/downdrafts, so I was constantly battling the altitude. Once I found a power setting that seemed to hold 3000ft fairly well, I'd hit an updraft and before I knew it, I was up at 3200ft, in a 10degree descent, struggling to get 250FPM down to get my altitude centered. I feel like I did pretty well with the communications, but the altitude holding and course headings with all of the wind changes were really giving me a hard time. It was definitely challenging. We did the GPS-28 and the GPS-10 approach into Delaware, and decided to scrap Marion, because of the poor weather. Instead, we headed straight to Mansfield for a couple of approaches there. On our way, at 4000ft, we headed directly into a cloud bank, where the snow was falling, BIG FLAKES, and started to pick up some ice on the leading edge. Not only was this my first actual, but it was also my first encounter with icing! Very exciting! Here's a depiction of a part of my ground track from Delaware, OH to Mansfield, and some of the weather that I flew around.