Loong cross country
Long solo cross country is the moment in your flight training where you actually start feeling that there might be something in this flying thing. It’s the very first time you are actually turned loose and it can’t happen until you positively convince your instructor that you won’t get lost and fly until you run out of fuel and crash. Also usually at this moment you should have at least one, maybe two shorter one leg cross country flights done where all you actually have to do if take off, turn to heading and flight straight for certain amount of time and the destination airport should show up in sight just in time for descending and landing. In my case there was no time for that, and my instructor agreed that based on what he saw during our dual cross country flights I should be fine starting with the long one.
Then, there was the route problem. Terry (as probably most of the instructors) has some ‘preferred’ routes that almost every student of his is flying routinely. It doesn’t do any bad to the students yet it gives him the ability to judge your preflight preparation with just a single glance at your navigation log. Unfortunately as I fly Cherokee 180, which is quite a bit faster than the old might C150, traditional long cross country flight in my case would take less than two hours total. So again Terry agreed to my suggestion about picking slightly longer route (well… almost twice as long).
The route I planned had five legs. Two of them were way longer than required 50nm for the longest one, two were almost 50nm and one small jump of just 23.8nm, all together added up to nice 241nm cross country flight. I woke up at 6am and sit down almost 2h preparing all the logs, writing down checkpoints, wind corrections, times, fuel burns and so on. Due to slowly lifting morning fog my departure was delayed about and hour, before we saw that all airports along my route report at least 6 miles visibility. I had plenty of time to do slow preflight check, fill up the tanks and put everything together. I won’t lie to you – I felt a little nervous. It’s going to be my first unsupervised long flight. That’s why I’m doing this whole thing – to fly places.
I finally took off at 1046, turned west and headed for Pella. First leg was the easiest one. Plenty of very distinct points on my route to navigate by almost without need to look at the map. One thing worth mentioning was that when I got closer to the town I figured out that my planned course will take me directly over downtown. So I modified the flight path a little bit and flew over the highway which as a result put me nicely on downwind for selected runway. Close pattern finished with nice landing and first leg was done.
Second leg from Pella to Bloomfield wasn’t so easy, yet it still was relatively simple. I had prepared 3 checkpoints, two of them very easy to spot and the third one so close to the destination airport that I didn’t really have to look for it – I had the airport in sight already.
Bloomfield to Keokuk leg presented much more challenge. Low cloud deck (funny thing – it wasn’t reported on any of the stations) kept me flying at 2700-2800ft. Nowhere near any problems other than from that low altitude it’s a little harder to find distinct features to navigate by. First half of the leg was trivial as it was going by the road. Then at one point I really wasn’t sure how far I am. At last I saw a water which I thought was a small creek I was supposed fly over. In just a minute it turned out to be Des Moines river. You know, one could mix small creek with Des Moines river. One couldn’t mix Mississippi with anything else. So as you can see on the track – some small course corrections and I was there.
Next one was simply jump from Keokuk to Burlington. Nothing interesting to say about this. Basicaly when you climb out from one, you see another. The only challenge was that there is right traffic on 12 and 18 runways in Burlington to prevent flying over the city. Check it out on the track – I managed to stay away from it pretty nicely I’d say.
Last, and the longest leg from Burlington back home presented yet another set of challenges. The area is so populated that it’s hard to distinguish one town or settlement form the other. Thankfully highway 218 makes all that much easier. The turning left and right you can see at the end of the track is not me being lost, rather me trying to come to the airport from south-ish ‘practice area’ direction.
But the most interesting thing happened at the very end of the flight. When I entered the pattern for 15 I saw that there is Cessna on the departure point standing like it was preparing for take off. Initially it didn’t bother me much as I thought it has plenty of time to take off before me but when it was still sitting there during my turn to final I had no choice as to go around. And around. And again. All that time I was thinking how to manage the situation. I knew I could land over it and touch down around 1/3rd of the runway. but what if he didn’t see me and started his roll just in front of me, or even worse – while I was directly above him? At the very same moment I decided to make it my last circle and go to Iowa City or Cedar Rapids I saw a golf cart driving down the runway. So apparently something was wrong with the Cessna and it wasn’t going to take off. I went south in the direction of practice area and after slooow 360 I saw that they are towing the Cessna back to the hangars. One more 360 and the runway was clear. It turned out that apparently the engine died and because the battery was weak and it has generator not alternator they were unable to restart the engine on the runway. Oh well it just added few minutes to my cross country flight.
After checking out clock on the ground it turned out that my very long route with unforeseen extension at the end took just below 3.5h (3.4 to be exact). So I still need to fly one more solo cross country to fulfill requirements. This one will be much shorter though so there is a chance I’ll do it over the weekend. If not, I’ll try to wrap it up next Saturday.
There is even a chance I might be able to schedule my checkride in September!.
3.4h/0.0h inst : 5 to/ldg logged
52.3h/2.0h inst : 278 to/ldg total
