Cross Country

Long dual cross country is probably one of those moments (next to first flight and solo) that you remember the most. It’s also the one that is giving you the gasp of what is waiting for you when you finally finish your license. Weather was cooperating so I planned mine for nice Saturday morning.

Planning. Before we could go Terry had me come to the airport few days earlier, sit with him and train planning. I plotted courses on the chart, filled out flight planner logs, decided on check points and talked to the FSS about the weather. As it was to early for true weather, for training purposes I got the briefing for that particular day just to simulate. Later I came back home, nicely filled out three flight logs and flight plans (one for each leg) with all the information I had ahead of time.

Preflight briefing. When I came to the airport in the morning, I checked the weather again (btw. it turned out to be exactly the same, we have quite stable masses around here for last week or so with center of big High pressure mass just around the corner), filled out remaining positions on the flight logs (wind deviation, time enroute and fuel consumption), and we headed for the flight.

The flight. Tons of small things that made me understand why long cross country flights are planned at the end of the training. Basically at this moment flying should be your second nature. Between radio communication, navigation (bots radio and dead reckoning) and all the calculation work I was made to do (for training purposes I had checkpoints selected every 10 minutes or so) there was little to no time to actually concentrate on the flying itself. And yet, I was supposed to keep the plane straight and level and of course on the course. I have to admit that although I didn’t screw up on any big thing. there is bunch of things I’m not proud of myself and I have to work on more. I didn’t get lost (not even once), I always new more or less where I’m on the map, the checkpoints were showing up as they were supposed to and time corrections I calculated on one of the legs where we had 10 knots tail wind turned out to be pretty accurate considering I did them in my head. I landed 2 times at unknown to me before airports, I didn’t confuse runways and taxiways, I didn’t run over any other taxiing plane. I even managed the communication just fine. What bothers me are just details. Like flying half of the leg with fuel pump on, agreeing to fly at 2500 ft while the sectional clearly stated that minimum safe altitude in this area is 2600 (even though the tower wasn’t even close to my course I should have point that out to Terry and decide to fly higher) or not exactly going through all the checklist positions at one takeoff. Here I have plenty of small things I have to work on before I feel confident I can pass the exam. Oh well, now it’s time for 5h total of solo cross country flights, we’ll get there.

P.S. Here is why I do this. If I wanted to do this triangle in a car I’d have to drive 5 hours non stop. Flying – I was back at home 4 h 30 minutes after I left and during this time I spent more than 1h preparing for the flight on the ground and another 15 minutes at each airport just to stretch legs. If I was in the hurry I could do it in less than two and half hours (which is half the time). And this is route that has good road connections (two lane highways and at least 65 limit). If I was to get to some small town in the middle of nowhere savings would be much, much bigger.

GPS track

2.7h/0.0h inst : 3 to/ldg logged
47.1h/2.0h inst : 267 to/ldg total