I’ve had two cross country flights now. Both of them have been to KJVL and back. The first was in the day, and the second, a week and a half later, was at night. I’m not going to get into a how-to, but I did learn a few things from these two experiences.
The first flight I planned was more or less a straight line from the home airport to the destination. About four hours before the flight I calculated the wind from the forecast, the ground speed and correction angle, three ascents up to higher tiers under the Class B airspace I had to fly under, and all of this down to the degree and the second. During the flight, things went drastically different than the plan. The winds were not what was forecasted four hours before and the airplane’s performance was different than the POH. The first climb out of the airport we reached altitude much earlier. The headings were all wrong. Apparently I miscalculated a few VORs. But the thing that got me the most was how task saturated I got with all of this.
The course was across the edge of the sectional chart. These things are not small, and futzing around with a map while flying is just ridiculous. The next flight I used the TAC I have for the Southern half and the sectional for the Northern half of the trip. I needed to hand over controls to get help flipping the map during the flight. It definitely would have helped to use a pair of paper clips to keep only the relevant parts of the map open if I were to only use the sectional for the whole flight. I can totally see the utility of having this open on a tablet or phone. After I pass the check-ride I’m definitely going to rely more heavily on electronic charts like Avare! (I just cannot bring myself to spend the money on Foreflight and Apple right now).
I never actually got to logging my actual time to checkpoints. Between flying the plane, futzing with the map, trying to figure out where exactly I was, managing the radio, managing the maps, keeping my nav logs from falling out of the clipboard, etc…I just never got to logging them. Ironically we arrived right about on time, but not on course.
There’s two huge things I learned about all of this. First, dead-reckoning, the act of flying in a direction at a speed for a time and getting to a point…that’s just not going to happen on its own. It’s only half of what you need to rely on. Pilotage is just as important. I relied way too heavily on dead-reckoning. The second thing about pilotage is that you really need to get familiar with your landmarks. Not just the landmarks on course, but in big wide path around the course. Use Google Maps satellite view and find some notable things from the sky: how roads cross and meet, the shapes of lakes, interesting buildings, water towers. Look for where the forests are near the towns. The towns are not the shapes they are drawn on the maps. Know where the nearby highways are. Find the landmarks near the class B and C airspace rings. If you’re off course, know the landmarks that will tell you so. Know how big a small town is that is near an even smaller town when viewed from the sky.
Two tricks I picked up since that day cross country. First, a frequency card. Have all of the frequencies in order on a card so that you can preprogram the next one as you go. The same for the VOR radials. Write down the Morse code for the VORs when you check them so you don’t have to look at the sectional chart. Second, a wind card. Write down the wind correction angle and ground speed in directions around your flight path.
There are also two tools I want to build for myself. First, I want to build a tool that will tell me the radial and distance from a given VOR to a given GPS coordinate based on the GPS coordinate of the VOR. I only just found out yesterday though that Avare! will actually show this when in the map view. Selecting a point on the map brings up a planning window that shows both the GPS coordinate and the VOR information for that point. SkyVector does not do this (however, I did find out that you can actually set a waypoint in SkyVector using the VVVXXXYYY nomenclature, where VVV is the VOR, XXX is the radial, and YYY is the distance). This is another great reason to use electronics after the check-ride. The second tool I want to build is far easier: a wind-card calculator. The trigonometry of ground speed and wind correction angle is easy enough to just use Excel instead of an E6B computer (umpteen number of times over for every angle). The tougher part will be trying to show this graphically so that it can simply be printed as a fully finished wind card. Wind cards will be super handy during traffic patterns on windy days.
The night cross country to the same airport when much smoother. This is partly because I had time to digest the day cross country and what went wrong with it. The other part was because flying at night was in some ways easier. I could not see the airport at all in the day, but I spotted the beacon for it 20+ nm out at night. The indistinct towns amid the snowy landscape were very easy to see at night. Lastly, the night cross country was more of an experience flight than a rigorous cross country exercise. It was a gateway into seeing the challenges of flying at night to unfamiliar places. To be honest, I loved much more than flying in the day.
I’m more than half way there now. From now on it’s not about how to fly but how to navigate, how to deal with emergencies (have all the hood time to work on), perfecting maneuvers, getting in my solo time, and studying for the tests. It seems so close now!
FencerPTS 