Silver City to Amarillo

I've heard of Amarillo over the years, but never had any interest in visiting. Today, while I was wondering out loud about where to go next, a voice from the next room said, "Go to Amarillo." So I guess that will be my next flight. After looking at the complicated restricted airspaces of the White Sands Missile Range, I decided the better part of valor would be to choose a route that avoids the entire mess.

Nice open tiedown area at Silver City.

Lined up for takeoff from Silver City runway 26.

Lifting off from runway 26.

Approaching a high ridge of mountains in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness area.

Fun view out the left window, with the left engine in sight.

Approaching a thin layer of apparently scattered clouds, which at first appear to be above me.

Nope, not above me, and I entered the clouds at 10:40. I expected to break out of these "scattered" clouds after a few seconds...

And... another miscalculation, as I finally started seeing the ground again at 10:54. In real life, and not on an IFR flight plan, I wouldn't have allowed this to happen. I'd either have avoided the clouds, or asked for a popup IFR clearance, when I decided not to avoid the clouds.

Since I'm in the simulator, I just pretended I'd gotten my IFR clearance, and am setting up to fly the ILS runway 04 approach to Amarillo. This approach includes a DME Arc, flying a circle 14 miles in radius from Panhandle VOR at the airport, at 5500 feet, to join the ILS final approach path to runway 04. The ILS gets me down to within 200 feet of the runway, in case I were dealing with low clouds, which I'm not, as the airport is actually VFR, so this is just for practice.

I don't think I've ever taken advantage of the Vertical Navigation (VNAV) capability in the Garmin G530, so I decided to give that a try on this descent toward Amarillo. The VNAV guidance worked well, although, as handy as it is, it seems fairly primitive. The vertical guidance doesn't appear on the main moving-map screen. The only way I found to see the vertical guidance, was to leave the GPS unit showing the VNAV screen, instead of the moving map, so some situational awareness can be lost. Of course, it's not difficult to flip back and forth between those screens, but still...

And all of a sudden, I've descending to the right altitude to fly the DME arc to the final approach, and I'm now on short final approach to Amarillo runway 04.

On the ground at Amarillo.