I thought we were going to get weathered out again today (the day before Thanksgiving), but Mac had me check in on weather reports from various stations along the way, and it turned out that we could do French Valley with some non-obvious altitude adjustments. And so we did.
The deal is, I have switched focus to planning (and then flying) cross-country trips. Planning for a cross-country trip — defined as 50 miles or more as the crow flies — is a bit more complex than simply taking off and flying. For example:
- Airspace: The longer the trip is, the more chances that you’ll be flying through airspace other than the standard Class A, B, C, etc., that takes a little bit of extra thought. Things like “Restricted Airspace,” “Prohibited Airspace,” “Military Operations Areas,” and so on.
- Communications: Generally speaking, you will definitely be monitoring Departure and Approach, and there’s a good chance you’ll be asking for radar advisories. You need to have a clear idea of what the various frequencies are that you’ll be using.
- Weather: It can’t be stressed enough – you need to know how to find out all there is to find out about expected weather along the route.
- Speed: The winds aloft can work for you, or work against you. In either case, they can definitely affect your speed, and from time to time you need to pull a slide rule out and computer your actual ground speed. This relates to the next topic: fuel consumption.
- Fuel consumption: Related to speed. When you fly you don’t talk about how many miles a plane can do on a full tank of gas, you talk about how many hours it can do. So you have to computer your speed, and then see if that will affect how long it’s going to take you to get where you’re going.
- Navigation: And of course you need to know where you are. Odd as it sounds, it’s really easy to get disoriented and lose track of where you are up there. So Mac’s general rule is to validate where you are every 15 minutes, and for that you need to have a plan for how you’re going to do that.
Anyway, we flew to French Valley as a first run on pulling all that stuff together. On the way up we tracked a relatively complex flight plan, but coming back we basically flew directly from French Valley to Ramona, and then hooked around for a straight in approach to Montgomery Field.
Here’s a Google Maps track of the entire flight. The trip up is in blue, and the trip back in red. All in all it was a pretty good flight, although I had two problems.
First, I completely botched the speed and distance calculations. The problem was that I had too many short legs at the beginning, and it was too difficult to do everything else I had to do in five or six minutes and compute speed at the same time. Mac told me that what I should do (and what I will do next time), is just put it off until I start hitting long legs.
Second, I got totally lost just before I got to the French Valley airport. Actually “lost” isn’t the right word. I knew exactly where I was, but I couldn’t find the airport. It was nuts! Fortunately, Mac told me that this routinely happens to all pilots when they fly into a new airport for the first time. He said that’s why many pilots actually prefer to fly into new airports using Instrument Flight Rules….because they get vectored in by Approach and then the control tower. He suggested that I download Google Earth and get a simulated view of what it is I’ll be seeing.
On the other hand, when we came back to Montgomery Field I had a flawless landing, and Mac said that if I could land like that consistently he’d never worry about me. Ha!
So early next week we’re going to fly halfway to Long Beach just to get a feel for it, and then next Friday we’re supposed to fly there…land…and come back. This will definitely be a milestone.
Wind, Sand, and Stars 
I find myself wondering as I’ve followed your journey through these lessons if the complication of systems, equipment, checks and balances has actually made it more likely that not only will things be more difficult, but that it is more likely they will go wrong. It may be the faulty memory of the time passed, but I have the feeling that if I were taking lessons today, I’d give up at the sheer volume of what you seem to have to pay attention to. We used to just get in the plane and fly, and learned things “by the seat of our pants”, minimal electronics, drew a line on a chart and used the transponder to triangulate off of a couple of beacons, look out the window and just go places. I have the feeling I’d look at all the gauges you have to deal with today and just panic.
Today I flew partially up to Long Beach, and then back out over the ocean. I’ll post about that tomorrow. But the fact is that you’re right, and when I got back I told Mac that I didn’t feel as though I were flying. Rather, I felt as though I were monitoring instruments the entire way: VOR, autopilot, MX20, etc. And that’s basically just what I did. Once I got a steady climb attitude, I put it on autopilot and didn’t take it off until about an hour later when I was getting ready to land. I told Mac that really doesn’t seem like flying. The deal is, in his world that’s what you do, because mainly he teaches commercial flying and IFR and multi-engines and such. And I certainly understand his point. But I told him that after this Long Beach trip I want to spend more time on just flying.
On the other hand I would add that (1) airplanes and flying have probably both gotten a bit more complex since you began, and (2) Southern California is supposedly one of the most complex and difficult pieces of airspace in the country. Mac has said since Day One that if I can learn to fly here, I’ll be able to fly anywhere. So I’m not going to complain too much.
I’m not sure autopilot existed except in scifi movies at the time. 😉
I got curious after your response and pulled up some photos online of the instrument panel of the old Cessna 150G that I learned to fly in – this one looks pretty much like what I remember: http://aviafilms.com/photos/cessna-150-instrument-panel.jpg
And I remember you talking about how they don’t do the “ground school” these days – here’s what the old school I trained at requires today: http://www.aviationcenter.aero/training.shtml#privatepilot (including ground school, which when I took it wasn’t optional) – though I can’t find my logbook (however, have now been forced to confront just how much crap I need to sort through in my closets), these requirements sound fairly similar to what I remember doing – the numbers may have changed, but I don’t think by too much. And I’m pretty sure we completed the ground school before our first flight, or maybe it was part-way through.