Florence to Greenville

Wrapping up my tour of South Carolina, I flew today from Florence back west to Greenville. I have a cousin who lives there. I chose real weather, although I knew that would be pretty bad at Florence, but should be OK by the time I got to Greenville. In fact, when I requested taxi clearance, I was turned down because it was IFR (instrument flight rules) only.

Not being much for the rules, I took off without permission and quickly climbed into the clouds for an up-close look at IFR conditions. While I got glimpses of the ground occasionally, mostly I was just looking at the inside of clouds:

I think I'll start working on IFR training though. You can actually do IFR flight plans in FSX, but then you have to be able to fly holding patterns and follow other complex instructions from air traffic control while maintaining very specific speed and altitude settings.

I've often thought about how FSX training would help with real world training and how it might hurt. Since you can't "feel" the plan in FSX, you tend to rely on the instruments more, which would probably help you to become an instrument rated pilot. On the other hand, not feeling the plane means you never get tricked by your senses. Down is always down, you don't get vertigo, etc. So perhaps in a real IFR situation, your FSX training wouldn't help as you wouldn't be prepared to deal with those false readings from your senses.

Anyway, while not IFR, I did request a flight following to help me since I could not see other air traffic. Also, by the time I got to Greenville, the weather had cleared a bit:
For this landing approach, instead of relying on the replay to take screen shots, I turned on the video recorded to record the landing, and then replayed that instead. It seems to be particular to this plane, although I've not fully tested that theory, but I've noticed that if you land, and then raise your flaps, and then replay the landing, it will show the landing with flaps up, even though they were actually down. Likewise, if you are parked after the flight (obviously with landing gear down), then when you replay earlier parts of the flight, it shows you with gear down even though the gear would have been up at that point.

Recording the landing and then replaying the recording seems to solve the problem. And as far as landings go, this one was pretty good, although as if frequently the case, I was off-center:
I just need to be a few feet over to my left. The landing my folks watched was about like this one except that I was lined up correctly. I put the main gear down, and then gently dropped the nose and the nose wheel touch down directly in the middle of the white center-line. I need to do some more landing practice in this plane until I can make that happen a lot more often.