"Nope. Try Massachusetts."
"Wow! When you said cross-country, I didn't know you meant it literally," I replied. "I've never done anything like that before. What kind of airplane are we talking about? A King Air? A Cessna 210?" (The truth is that I was hoping for a King Air.)
"You're not even close," my friend told me. "Try a Cessna 150."
Uh-oh, I thought. What am I getting myself into? On the other hand, I am a young pilot looking to build hours, and I've got nothing better to do. I decided to do it, and that decision began one of the greatest adventures of my life.
This trip was a big one, testing every aviation principle that I had learned in my flying career and forcing me to revisit skills that I hadn't really used in a while. It was also one of the highlights of my aviation career.
The great circle distance from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, to Bedford, Massachusetts, where the airplane was to be delivered, is 2,233 nautical miles. Based on the Cessna 150 performance charts, I could theoretically make the trip in about eight stops. Of course, this would require ideal conditions-something I knew I was unlikely to get. In fact, it took me 14 stops and 107 nm of diversions caused by headwinds, weather, air traffic control routing, and other delays before I reached my destination.
In the end, I traveled from John Wayne to Phoenix to St. John's, Arizona, and Albuquerque. From there I stopped in Dalhart, Texas; Liberal and Wichita, Kansas; Jefferson City, Missouri; Bloomington, Indiana; Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio; Pittsburgh and Scranton, Pennsylvania; Hartford, Connecticut; and finally Bedford, Massachusetts.
There were some very interesting moments along the way-especially when it came to the weather. Weather issues fell into three main categories on this trip-the effects of weather on routing, preparing for unfamiliar weather conditions, and using weather reports and forecasts for decision making before takeoff and en route.
My first weather insights came as I examined my proposed route. I had to decide when to choose the most direct path and when to alter my route around potential weather problems. For example, if I had made the trip during the winter, I would certainly have chosen a southern route. It might have taken somewhat longer, but it would have kept me away from the most likely severe weather trouble spots.
Keeping in mind that I would be flying a Cessna 150 and that everything east of New Mexico would be unfamiliar territory to me, I decided to go around the mountains to the south and then try to fly the most direct course after leaving Phoenix. I figured that this would work since I had some free time to wait out any unexpected weather.
To time my trip for the best possible weather, I carefully watched various high- and low-pressure systems and tried to predict their movements beginning a few weeks before my planned departure date. Because it was spring, I knew that I could expect most of the bad weather to be associated with low-pressure systems. The majority of the low-pressure systems that I had been tracking began in the Pacific Ocean. And they had a couple of other features in common as well-they generally tracked a southwest to northeast course, and they were usually strong enough to make it from coast to coast.
During the weeks before my trip, low-pressure systems were hitting the California coast at the rate of about one per week. My plan was to time my departure to match the lull between systems. I hoped to be able to time it so that I could fly between low-pressure systems for the entire trip. As a result, I delayed my departure date by a week, missing a system that ultimately produced tornadoes in Tennessee.
Of course, my strategy didn't work perfectly. I left Southern California a few days after a low-pressure system had moved across the state. Unfortunately, this system lost strength and stalled over Ohio. Eventually, I caught up with it and experienced several delays between Cincinnati and my final destination caused by bad weather associated with this system. In Cincinnati, I was delayed more than eight hours by severe thunderstorms. Then, from Pittsburgh to Boston I had to contend with fog and instrument weather conditions.
The more I looked at my route and the length of my journey, the more I knew that I'd better be prepared for the worst-case scenario-low IFR conditions in unfamiliar territory. I bought instrument charts and approach plates for the Midwest and Northeast, and I studied them for alternate airports and emergency landing sites. Next, I used a flight simulator to practice the instrument approaches into various airports along my route. I even waited for bad weather days in Southern California so that I could go out and practice flying in actual instrument conditions. This practice paid off as I made the last third of my journey. I had to fly instrument approaches into Scranton and Bedford.
My instrument-flying skills weren't the only ones to get a workout on this trip. I also had plenty of chances to practice my decision-making skills, and many of my decisions were made with help from weather experts at various facilities along the way. Flight watch helped me during the first leg of the trip when I noticed that I wasn't making the groundspeed I expected. The briefers advised me of turbulent conditions and unforecast headwinds along my route, allowing me to adjust my altitude and power setting to ensure that I would make it to Phoenix without extra stops. Flight service stations helped me to get through the Midwest safely, and the wind information that they provided allowed me to pick up tailwinds at some points, stretching my time between fuel stops. The experts at FSS also warned me about low visibility along my route that affected my selection of airports for stopovers.
If there was one thing I might have done differently, it would have been to switch the times when I flew. I could have saved a lot of time by flying some parts of the trip at night. Afternoon convective buildups slowed me at several points, forcing me to delay departure times by as much as 12 hours. If I had timed my trip so that I slept in the afternoons and flew at night after the convective weather had dissipated, I could probably have improved my efficiency.
Of course, if I had flown at night I might have missed some of the most spectacular moments of my trip-seeing downtown Cincinnati off one wing and barges being pushed up the Ohio River off the other; crossing the New Mexico Rockies; sometimes flying at 9,500 msl but only 1,000 agl then, a second later, seeing the world drop off beneath as I passed over the Continental Divide. There were plenty of other great moments, too, like seeing the St. Louis Arch and the meeting of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. It was moments like these that made me thankful that I'm a pilot. If you ever get the opportunity to take such a trip, do it. It's something that I guarantee you'll never forget.
