Oct. 17 — Lucky me! I got to fly the Win-A-Twin Comanche to AOPA's Expo in Long Beach, California! This is one long cross-country flight, with a start at the Clermont County (Ohio) Airport (I69) and a finish almost 2,000 nm — all the way across the United States. I like flying long trips, so this will be a great time for me to both stretch my legs and enjoy more of our/your sweepstakes airplane.

Icing frustration
But first, I had to get to I69. I was at AOPA headquarters at the Frederick Municipal Airport (FDK) in Maryland and needed a ride across the Appalachians. AOPA Pilot Editor-in-Chief Tom Haines offered a lift in his Beechcraft A36 Bonanza, but the fates had other ideas. For three days, ice-laden clouds with bases well below the minimum en route altitude (MEA) prevented us from launching.

On Saturday, October 16, Hal Shevers — owner and CEO of Sporty's Pilot Shop (which is based at I69) — came to the rescue. He generously offered a ride in his Cessna Citation II. After takeoff, it was an enjoyable, one-hour, 15-minute cruise at 35,000 feet above those loathsome clouds to reach the destination. Thanks, Hal.

I69 to TUL
It was cold the morning I left — about 39 degrees at the surface. Good thing skies were clear for the early part of the route, or else icing would again be a factor.

The flight plan took me from I69 to the Nabb VOR, then down Victor 47 to Pocket City VOR, then via Victor 190 to the Springfield, Missouri, VOR, where I'd hang a left turn to join Victor 14 into Tulsa International. Trip length was 609 nm, give or take a few.

The flight was plagued with strong headwinds, and that was too bad. The trip was originally flight-planned for 165 knots and would have taken just three hours, 40 minutes. But no! The Honeywell Bendix/King EHSI (electronic horizontal situation indicator), the Garmin AT GNS 480 GPS/Navcom, and the Garmin AT MX 20 multifunction display (MFD) were all telling me that my progress over ground was a mere 137 knots. A 28-knot headwind was right on my nose.

This, thanks to a huge mass of cold air that had dropped down from Canada and invaded as far south as Tennessee. The trough that shoved this air southward was the same one that shoved all those clouds over the Appalachians for the previous few days, sending rain and icing conditions all over the Mid-Atlantic and Ohio Valley states.

After Nabb came hope. No, that's not a VOR; it was the groundspeed. It crept up to 143 knots. So did the outside air temperature. At my cruise altitude of 6,000 feet, it was 11 degrees Celsius at Nabb, but by Pocket City VOR, it was a toasty 15 degrees. I left the Janitrol heater off because it wasn't all that cold in the cabin. Plus, I don't really like the idea of gasoline-fired heaters much, what with a flame burning away in the nosecone like that. Our/your Twin Comanche has a heater with a ceramic core, so cracks, burn-throughs, and other problems should be rare. But still, I play it cautious with Janitrols. I remember one time a Janitrol quit on me during an Atlantic crossing in February. It got so cold that I...well, that's another story.

By the Marion, Illinois, VOR on Victor 190, groundspeed leapt to 151 knots; by Maples VOR it was 157; by Springfield VOR it was 160 knots! And it's 22 degrees! Manna from heaven! By now I was flying just above an undercast, in and out of clouds. This is just the right spot — the impression of speed is very great, what with all those clouds zipping by. Looks good, too.

Passing by Springfield and Neosho VORs cast me back three and four years ago. I came by this way with our "Millennium Mooney" and "Sweepstakes Bonanza," as I had on many other earlier trips. It's the gateway through the heartland. And what fun it was to fly that Mooney from FDK to Boeing Field in Seattle, and the V-tail from Texas to Chicago. So it is now, with a third sweeps airplane.

After Neosho, ATC gave me an arrival procedure into TUL — the Vinta2 arrival. Entering this into the GNS480's flight plan is a snap. Punch up the flight plan page, hit the PROC (procedures) softkey, and up pops a gob of choices — arrivals, departures, and instrument approaches. Select Vinta2, and it's automatically entered at the end of the flight plan. After that, the ILS to Runway 18L was entered, and I was all set for the landing.

I gassed up at Mercury Air Center with 78.2 gallons. The JP Instruments EDM-760 engine analyzer/fuel totalizer said I had 35.8 gallons left as a fuel reserve when I landed. The trip took four hours, five minutes, so I burned an average of 9.5 gph per engine per hour. My goal was to run the engines cool, and EGTs ran around 1,410 to 1,430 degrees Fahrenheit; cylinder head temperatures were about 385 degrees (redline is 500 degrees).

TUL to ABQ
This leg went out of Tulsa on Victor 140 to Panhandle VOR, then on Victor 12 to Albuquerque. Trip length would be 582 nm, and I planned on another four hours at the wheel. Cloud layers were along the route, but no icing was forecast. Moderate turbulence, however, was heavily advertised.

This leg started to work on me. The headwinds were back with a vengeance: 133 knots at the Kingfisher VOR. Then the bottom dropped out of the altimeter setting: 29.64 inches. Was I crossing a front? A call to flight watch revealed some more reminders of the change in seasons.

"This is more of a winter situation," he said. "We've got a deep low over Colorado with a tight pressure gradient...at least the winds are consistent, though, so turbulence shouldn't be a problem — unless you go up to 24,000 feet, where headwinds are 100 knots." And smooth it was, at my 6,000 feet.

I flew on the Osborne tip tanks for one hour, 32 minutes, then switched to the auxiliary tanks 30 nm past the Sayre VOR on Victor 140. That's 225 nm on the tip tanks alone. I still had 90 gallons of fuel remaining, and the EDM-760 told me that I'd make ABQ with a two-hour reserve — even at my current, 150-knot groundspeed, and even burning 9.5 gph per side. An instrument like that buys you peace of mind. Keeps you from doing a lot of math problems the old-fashioned way, too.

Sayre is 102 nm east of Amarillo and in some of the flattest terrain in all of Texas. I punched up the GNS480's "Nearest" page and looked for a nearby...anything.

There are some funny names on aviation charts, and the nearest VOR was one of them: Burns Flat. What happened there, that they named the town after an apparent razing?

Out west, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, things can go silent on ATC frequencies. Especially when there's no weather to speak of. With the Meggitt/S-TEC autopilot doing the work, I took the opportunity to fire up the PS Engineering PAV 80 AM/FM radio/CD/DVD player and started searching for an FM station.

And there it is! 99.3 MHz, and the announcer yells out "Burns Flat rocks!" and started playing classic rock music. "Whole Lotta Love" follows, and I had stereo over the Bose X headset. Yes, you can play air guitar while flying. In fact, it's a job requirement for long cross-country pilots.

"Walk This Way" followed, but then ATC cut in (the PAV 80 automatically mutes whenever there's an ATC transmission) with a new frequency. I never did find out the call sign of the radio station. The announcer didn't give one. He just called it "The Zoo."

A huge cross and a field of wind generators goes by, and then came the turbulence. Moderate at times, I'd say.

By Tucumcari VOR, it was time to get down to business. A convective sigmet was in effect for a huge area east of ABQ, and I'd have to negotiate it. I couldn't have done it comfortably without the WSI Inflight datalink weather service. With the WSI weather data coming down from the satellite, the MX 20 showed the precipitation echoes and their contours, gave cloud top heights, and gave the direction of cell movement. I turned south to avoid the worst of it, then went through the softest spots. There were some good jolts of turbulence, but I had it a lot better than those who diverted north toward Santa Fe. Cell activity was increasing there, and you could see it on the WSI radar. Anyone with on-board radar couldn't possibly have seen through the echoes I was negotiating — the radar signals would have attenuated, lost their strength. With datalink radar imagery, you see ground-based radars that show complete coverage, of the type you'd see at a Nexrad site. As a matter of fact, the WSI display is made up of a composite of Nexrad imagery.

Albuquerque's weather was good — the storms had left the runways and ramps wet and were now angrily stomping through the mountains to the east. I made a pretty good crosswind landing on Runway 30 (winds were 240 at 17, gusting to 25) and taxied to Cutter Aviation. The leg took exactly four hours to fly, and the Win-A-Twin burned 73.1 gallons.

One day down, another to go. And what's this? Rain in southern California?

Check back to see how this last leg turns out. — Thomas A. Horne

Home stretch to LGB

Oct. 18 — The expected has happened: A front from the Pacific has moved onshore, covering coastal California — including my destination, Long Beach's Daugherty Field (LGB) — in instrument meteorological conditions. Still, the show must go on, so I leave Albuquerque International Sunport Airport (ABQ), bound for AOPA Expo.

For this leg, approximately 585 nm across the desert southwest, the main factor would be headwinds, like the previous day's trip from Ohio. Headwinds, as in 40 knots on the nose at my planned cruise altitude of 11,000 feet. That's the minimum en route altitude (MEA) along most of my way from ABQ. The route would be from ABQ to the Hector VOR via Victor 12, then across Southern California's coastal range via Victor 8 to Seal Beach VOR, and then an instrument approach into LGB.

The trip started oh-so-slowly. The Win-A-Twin climbed surprisingly well, considering ABQ's elevation of 5,355 feet. Temperatures were in the low 60s, though, so density altitude effects were a bit muted. Cleared first to 7,000, then to 11,000 feet, I turned west, leveled off, and engaged the Meggitt/S-TEC System Fifty-Five X autopilot and its altitude-hold and GPSS features. Now the autopilot would follow the route programmed into the Garmin GNS 480, making all the necessary turns automatically.

A few minutes later, after the airplane had settled down in cruise, came the bad news: a 123-knot groundspeed. This, with power set at full throttle, 2,500 rpm, and fuel flow set at 9 gph per engine. In no-wind conditions, I should have been flying at 170 knots, and the trip would last just 3.5 hours or so. But at this rate, the GNS 480 GPS/Navcom was predicting a five-hour trek. Good thing I had 120 gallons of fuel aboard.

Icing became a factor by the Zuni VOR. That's when the cloud layers lowered, putting me in the soup. The EDM-760's outside air temperature probe was showing 33 degrees Fahrenheit; the Questair stemless OAT mounted on the pilot's side window said it was 45 degrees. This reading had to be artificially high, because I was seeing mixed ice forming on the wings and propeller spinners.

I couldn't descend because of the MEA. So the only strategy was to climb and hope I'd clear what I knew to be a shallow cloud deck. I'd been seeing patches of clear, blue sky zipping overhead.

The climb did the trick, and soon I was cloud-free at 12,000 feet. This lasted until I reached the Drake VOR, when the tops rose to meet my altitude. So it was up to 13,000 feet for what I hoped would be a brief time. In the climb, my groundspeed dropped to 90 knots. The GNS 480, which updates ETEs in real time, rapidly wound up to show that I'd reach LGB in another three hours. Fuel reserves might be tight.

Groundspeed rose to 125 knots, then 137 knots, by the time I reached the Hector VOR — the last fix before turning to cross the mountains into coastal Southern California. OATs rose to 36 degrees. The GNS 480 said I'd land with almost two hours of fuel reserves. I felt a whole lot better.

I was given the Kayoh4 arrival into LGB, which I plugged into the Garmin. A series of stepdowns cleared me to 8,000 feet, then 6,000, then 4,000. For the most part, the ride through the murk was turbulence-free, even though wind shear and moderate turbulence was forecast. Of course, the moment I mulled this over, a shot of bad air jolted the plane, sending the approach book toward the copilot's rudder pedals.

The preflight briefing at ABQ predicted a 1,500-foot ceiling for the arrival at LGB, but it was way off. Conditions were wind variable at 5 knots; visibility 10; 4,800 scattered, ceiling 7,000 overcast; temperature 21, dew point 14; altimeter 29.88 in Hg. Not exactly sunny southern California, but better than 1,500 overcast.

The ILS to Runway 30 followed (N.B.: The glideslope is out of service), and so did one of my rare (everything is relative) firm arrivals in the Win-A-Twin. Total time for the flight — a tiring 4.9 hours, with a total fuel consumption of 81.8 gallons. This leg was work — no time for rock music on the radio or for sightseeing.

Now our/your Twin Comanche is parked at AOPA Expo's static display, at AirFlite Services' ramp. All of us here at AOPA hope you'll be able to come to Expo and take a look at the Win-A-Twin. After all, it may be yours some day very soon. — TAH