There is now an updated version of this guide.
I’ve only done it twice, so I imagine that I will make alterations to this guide after we have done it as a family. Both times I was with people with a high tolerance for discomfort, which helps with this sort of adventurous travel. Keeping that in mind, here were the simple tenets that helped us across, once to the East and one back home to the West. Continue reading
I’ve been a good customer of many businesses across the country, a lot of them situated on airfields. I use a website called AirNav to look up airfields before I land there. It will tell me if the food is edible, the fuel is cheap, and the people friendly.
FBO (I’ve started a glossary!) stands for Fixed Base Operator. So, unlike a charter operator, which could just own a plane and land places to grab passengers, an FBO has at least one location that is fixed to a particular airfield. They vary wildly in the services they provide. I like both ends of the spectrum. Sometimes I am the little guy visiting the huge, jet-ready FBO, and I get all the luxury that the private-jet crowd is used to even thought I am in a little bug-smasher. Other FBOs are geared toward the learning-to-fly crowd (and, indeed, offer instruction and rental planes) and it can feel like you’ve stepped back into the 1950s when you walk in (the flight training business is not very lucrative). I like walking into those, since it feels like so many pilots have stood on the same worn carpets talking about flying. Adam and I learned at a small flight school, so they also feel familiar all the way back to my student pilot days. Continue reading
First Wave
Traveling across the continent in the plane for the first time was not something I took lightly. I read a lot, studied the charts a lot, and talked to a lot of other pilots. After much consultation, this is what I packed into the plane (before we then loaded it with our luggage). As usual, click on a thumbnail to see the full-sized photo.
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We can read you…
Returning west, we were often dodging through the clouds. We flew at ten thousand feet or so, and descending to an airport seven thousand feet below took fifteen to twenty minutes. At least, that was a comfortable rate. We could also just push the noise over and scream down, but then we would be swallowing a lot during the ride to lunch to get our ears to pop.
The ride up through the eastern portion of Kansas was a real game of storm dodging. Kansas City Center was extremely helpful. There was another line of heavy precipitation headed our way, but we were half an hour ahead of it. We were headed for Manhattan, Kansas, which calls itself “The Little Apple.” So cute. Continue reading
Here is an important lesson. After my flight from the Canadian border to the eastern tip of Long Island, I was wiped out. I parked in the pitch black at night on an unfamiliar ramp. I did my usual parking job, carefully on the painted T and with the pair of the little red metal chocks under the nose wheel.
Back on August 17, after our visit to the Diamond factory and our traditional return-to-civilization meal at the CN Tower, the boys and I crossed into the United States, cleared customs at the Buffalo airport and headed toward the eastern tip of Long Island, trying to make it to their cousin Freddie’s birthday party the following day.
There was weather. Continue reading
I’m not an environmental nut. I have a friend who says that the Green movement is just a substitute for religion, which scares me because it appears to be so true. There are some who proselytize, but most seem to use their Green belief to atone for the sins of the populace at large, as if a two minute shower will make a difference when China and India both pour oceans of gases into the atmosphere. These little acts of faith are just tear drops in the salted sea, as far as I can tell, as effective toward changing the trend in global warming as prayer.
Some of the blog isn’t going to be in the order it happened. Darn.
It was a long trip across the country to the east coast, and even though it was exciting and exhilarating, I was exhausted by the time I flew the last two hours twenty minutes solo from Maryland up to my sister’s place in Rhode Island. That was a Friday, August 3. It was a great arrival, because my sister, Brett, and her husband, Dave, weren’t sure I was going to make it. (I told them that it was possible that weather would force me down in New Jersey and that meant I would just spend the night in the city.) So they told my niece, Willa, and nephew, Jasper, that they were just going to the airport to watch the planes. Willa and Jasper are seven and four, when disappointment is a little more acute.
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East to West
BDR – AVP
Bob Whitehead, my business partner, decided that he’d rather brave the little plane than the cattle car of SouthWest to get back to Santa Monica.
Nell convinced me that the smart thing to do was to fly up to Bob’s place in Pennsylvania the night before (the plane was at Bridgeport, CT getting an oil change). So I took a Metro North commuter train out of Grand Central Station and up to Bridgeport. The train ride was longer than the plane ride across the Alleghenies.
There was an overcast sky, so I had filed an IFR flight plan, but it was a high ceiling over both airports and the few airports in between. I checked the chart and although there was rising terrain west of the Hudson it wasn’t high enough to meet the clouds. I would squeeze through VFR, which is more fun since I would get to sightsee along the way. The best laid plans…
I’ve written before about my anxiety concerning the engine that powers our plane. It’s a very simple internal combustion engine, but because the technology is so old, I am responsible for settings that are totally automatic in my Toyota. I open the throttle (allow air to mix with the fuel), adjust the revolutions per minute, and set the mixture of fuel to air. It doesn’t seem that I should be responsible for these things and for keeping the plane at the right altitude, attitude, airspeed and heading, but I am. Especially in the era of computers, where I fly with more computing power in my plane than they had in the lunar landing module (or back in mission control, for that matter), it seems absurd.
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Flying Summers Brothers 