After a long stretch of widespread fog and icy clouds, the skies in the Puget Sound area cleared—mostly—creating a good opportunity to fly an instrument approach in LIFR conditions at Olympia, the state capital southwest of Seattle.
Ride along in this video at my YouTube channel as I make the short hop in the A36 Bonanza from Boeing Field to fly the RNAV (GPS) RWY 17 approach at KOLM.
The approach offers LPV minimums to the same 200 ft DA and ½ mile visibility as the ILS, and I broke out only a couple of hundred feet above the decision altitude.
The sophisticated avionics and Garmin GFC 600 autopilot in the Bonanza make it easy to fly such approaches. But the skies were busy with training flights, and ATC had its hands full. As you’ll see, one confusing instruction from Seattle Approach had me scratching my head until the controller and I got on the same page.
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