Pilotage

Sometimes the geometry of flying a GPS-equipped airplane from point A to points B and C and then back to A involves something other than a series of Great Circle-straight lines.

Middle son and I planned a two-day intrastate college research trip from southwest Florida to Gainesville in the north-central part of the state, then southeast to the Atlantic coast and Daytona Beach, and finally back to the southwest coast and home base. It was an ideal itinerary for the Cessna 172 — far enough to easily justify taking the airplane instead of the interstate, yet close enough to complete each leg nonstop. Also, to make the trip the 172 would require a few minutes more but a fistful of dollars less than would a higher-performance single.

I was pleased with my rationalizations, but then two of Florida's most common natural features — the beach and summer thunderstorms — conspired to complicate the plans for efficient direct-to flying.

My son wanted to navigate to Gainesville via one of the local preferred visual routes. All coastal states have them. The procedure is simple: take off, turn into the sea breeze, and fly until reaching a narrow white band defining the transition zone between dry land and salt water. Then turn to the appropriate heading. I call it the Beach Positioning System — BPS. As long as you can see an ocean out one window and a continent out the other, it's tough to get lost.

Tough, but not impossible. If you find that the water is on the wrong side of the airplane, you've made one of two fundamental mistakes. Either you're headed in exactly the opposite direction, in which case a simple 180-degree turn will make things right, or — a second possibility — you're on the wrong coast. In Florida this isn't much of a problem. The state is narrow, and you can fly across to the correct shoreline in less than an hour. If, for example, you're over what you thought was coastal North Carolina, but you are confused because the compass points north and your front-seat passenger is looking out at trees and you're looking out at water, well, you've got a 2,300-mile-wide problem.

Navigating to Gainesville via BPS would be longer than GPS routing, but I agreed. We had the time and the weather; the beach would provide the view. We took off and initially headed southwest to the Lee County barrier islands, then turned north over the shoreline. The compass and the visual picture confirmed my hunch that we were on the correct coast headed in the correct direction. So far, so good.

Approaching Sarasota, we negotiated our way over Class C airspace and under Tampa's Class B airspace. North of Tampa the state bends northwest; we held our northeasterly heading to cross over the shoreline and go direct GNV.

That afternoon, with business concluded in Gainesville, we prepped the airplane for the trip to Daytona. Though shorter than the morning leg, it promised to be eventful because of afternoon thundershowers. Sure enough, the flight service briefer recommended against VFR because of active cells close to our direct route between Gainesville and Daytona. I explained that I could go IFR but didn't much care to enter the clouds when thunderstorms were present. He asked whether the 172 was equipped with radar. This was tantamount to admitting that he was not a pilot and didn't understand the inherent limitations of flying a 150-horsepower single with Mark I eyeballs and a com radio as the only thunderstorm detection and avoidance equipment aboard. Then he made an interesting suggestion.

"File IFR," he recommended, "and I'll put in the remarks box that you don't have thunderstorm avoidance equipment and would like weather advisories from ATC."

This was a first for me. The briefer apparently was aware that ATC provides traffic and weather advisories to VFR pilots only on a workload-available basis. He must have thought that with thunderstorms around, controllers could be too busy to take a VFR pilot by the hand. However, if I filed IFR, ATC service was assured. And, by noting in remarks that I could use some help finding my way around the weather, the briefer must have figured that I was more likely to get quality weather advisories.

All of that made good sense. My only hesitation in flying on an IFR clearance was the potential for having less flexibility in selecting routing and altitudes to avoid weather, but I decided that I could always cancel IFR and either complete the trip VFR or land and wait for the storms to dissipate. With fresh respect for the briefer's knowledge of the ATC way and his customer service approach, I filed an IFR flight plan.

About 25 minutes into the flight, the Jacksonville Center controller reported that "Daytona Approach advises a left turn to zero-eight-five to avoid weather just west of Daytona."

Apparently the Daytona Approach controller was acting on the note in my IFR flight plan, and he relayed the deviation even before I flew into his sector. That was encouraging. However, as long as I'm in visual meteorological conditions I trust my eyes, and my eyes were telling me that it looked good on our direct course. Fine, said the Center controller, just advise Daytona. She gave me the frequency for the handoff.

The Daytona controller listened as I explained my view of the weather and the best routing, then he repeated his recommendation to deviate to the east. This time I took his advice. They know the local weather better than I do, I thought, and with all of the flight training that goes on in the area (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is just one of the busy flight schools located at Daytona), they are used to working with pilots in light aircraft.

We passed safely to the north of the active weather and watched as thick, gray columns of precipitation spilled from the bases of the storms, accompanied by brief, brilliant strokes of lightning. My son was both fascinated and a little frightened. He had studied the awesome power of lightning in his high-school physics class, but he had never before seen cloud-to-ground lightning from the cloud's perspective.

We landed to the east at Daytona, into the warm, moist onshore breeze that was feeding the storms at our backs.

The next afternoon, storm activity was much more widespread over the southern half of the state. A direct route back to Fort Myers was out of the question, so with the water on the left side again but the compass indicating a southerly direction, we embarked.

The stormy weather turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Cape Canaveral is south of Daytona, and with the launch pad quiet and many of the restricted areas inactive, we were able to cruise along the western edge of the 15,000-foot runway (it's labeled as a "strip" on the sectional chart) where those hot-stick shuttle pilots make squeaker deadstick landings after spending a week or two floating around in space. Our route took us across the final approach course to the runway east to west. According to the VASI system lights to the left of the runway, I was way low on the glidepath. Never would have made the threshold in the big space glider.

The massive Vehicle Assembly Building and the launch pads were clearly visible just beyond the runway to the east. It was a thrilling sight.

I was prepared to fly BPS for about 150 miles south to West Palm Beach before clearing the storm activity to the west. Just south of Cape Canaveral I checked with flight watch for a weather update, and to my surprise the specialist gave me the all-clear on a direct heading to Fort Myers.

We left the Atlantic behind and switched to conventional navigation systems — VORs and GPS, with pilotage as a backup. Trying to correlate visible landmarks with symbols on a chart is difficult when flying over the featureless south Florida interior. But I knew that in Florida, if all else fails, I can find my way home by flying east or west until I reach a beach. Try that in Missouri.