The Sweetest Solo

Ask most pilots to name their most memorable moment as aviators, and many will give you an obvious answer: their first solo. Ask a pilot to recall his or her single most educational day of flying, and be prepared to wait a little while for the answer. When it comes, the story you hear may transport you back to the day when the pilot launched on the next major milestone of flight training, the so-called long cross-country - the first time he or she was turned loose for the day with the training aircraft, to swim out alone into the deep water of learning how to fly.

Solo was a milestone, to be sure, but it's the long cross-country that I remember best about my own early training. Years later, I always try to replicate the significance of it for my own students. In the preceding months my flight instructor and I had dropped in on some mighty interesting places in our two-seat trainer. He saw no reason to ease up now. Up to this point, I had ventured out on my own a time or two on short hops, with no particularly eventful moments except a very prudent 180-degree turn on my first attempt at a solo cross-country to get out of the way of a rather interesting "convective event." The lesson I had learned from that day's flying was still fresh in my mind: Weather forecasts don't stay fresh for very long. Certainly not for two or three hours on a humid spring morning.

But this was entirely different from my past solos - no barely qualifying 50-nautical-mile foray today. The proposed trip ran from the north side of our sectional deep into the south side of it.

For the first time I would use that clever little trick they show you that lets you extend a course line from one side of the chart to the other. And as I counted the vertical folds in the chart across which my route passed (each is 35 nm wide, by the way), I discovered that I would have to inspect the terrain in four panels, not the usual two. And that was just on leg one, the westbound leg. I found myself feeling a bit giddy, and yes, I also had a twinge of anxiety.

For one thing, I would be well out of any familiar airspace, not simply retracting steps I had taken in the comforting company of my CFI, as I had on the past solo cross-countries. (Remember, GPS was many years in the future.) For another, the route would take me over modest mountains, then above handsome but uniform countryside with few truly prominent landforms, and then into two busy, con- trolled airports on busy weekdays with the radios crackling. The second of these two destinations was on the fringe of New York City's bustling airspace. I pleaded with myself, "Please, don't commit a nightmare navigating blunder and set down at JFK under the impression that you have triumphantly arrived at beautiful Bridgeport, Connecticut." I remembered, and played, the tactical card that has helped so many pilots-in-training in like situations: announcing myself as a student pilot to the controllers I contacted. I found them all friendly, helpful, and understanding - even when it would have been easy for them to abandon the courtesy under the demands of the moment. This played more than a small role in the success and joy of my first unchaperoned date with my little trainer.

If you're in training now and are working toward this event, you will detect some differences in the cross-country you must fly and the one that I was required to carry off. If you fly it to minimum requirements, your trip will be shorter, by fully half, than mine was.

Specifically, this flight is now described in the federal aviation regulations as "one solo cross-country flight of at least 150 nautical miles total distance, with full-stop landings at a minimum of three points, and one segment of the flight consisting of a straight-line distance of at least 50 nautical miles between takeoff and landing locations." Back when I did it, it was a 300-mile ride, and one leg had to take me at least 100 miles from home. I did not consider this unreasonable - airplanes are for going places, not just for flying 50-mile-radius circles around the home field. I would make this point to any fledgling I encountered today. And with his or her consent I would turn back the regulatory clock for the sake of planning this very educational event. After all, this is a cross-country, not a cross-county outing.

The length of the trip was as important as its multiple destinations, and a similar structure should be used today. For instance, a 75-mile outbound leg, combined with a stop at a second airport nearby before returning home, could satisfy the requirements without busting your budget and still get you far enough out of familiar territory to be educational.

Just as in the real world of traveling in a general aviation aircraft, that long push under a midday sun, perhaps in bumpy air or a gathering summer haze, challenges you to fly and navigate well, even as you feel the first tiny pangs of fatigue setting in.

One realization many student pilots come to on their long cross-country flight is that it's harder to get established on a course being flown visually when leaving an unfamiliar airport, today's technology notwithstanding. And, absent the comfort provided by knowledge of your home field and its surroundings, it becomes all the more important to locate the runways you will pass along your route and keep a sharp eye out for off-field emergency landing sites in between. Develop this habit today and it will stay with you when the flights are strictly for pleasure.

I was the proud aviator that glorious day of my long solo cross-country, but oh how green I really still was. It was not my airmanship that brings this observation to mind; I was pleased with how I handled doubts when checkpoints were reluctant to appear and when airports seemed further down the shoreline than they belonged according to my compass and directional gyro.

Rather, it was a light-hearted moment on the ground that brought my true color to light. As I taxied away from the ramp at Bridgeport, Connecticut, I saw an opportunity to play "good aviation samaritan," which pleased my new-member-of-the-club vanity. A starling was busy building a nest in the tail of an airplane I was taxiing past. I keyed my mic and naively reported this adversity to ATC. "In the tail of that Mooney?" asked the guy in the tower. I didn't know what a Mooney was, so I read him the tail number of the bird's new domicile. He thanked me for the report and thankfully changed the subject. In a few minutes I was on my way.

It was a hot, bumpy ride home. I don't remember what kind of landing I made, so it must have been OK. I do remember talking on the telephone that night to some people who are important to me and describing my day's adventure. Several times I had to reiterate that I had accomplished this trip alone in the airplane. My dad, not a pilot and unsure if he was hearing a tall tale, rephrased his questioning on this important point several times before he was convinced that this had been a true solo flight. I finally drove the point home by explaining that a) this was a two-seat airplane; b) only one of the seats was occupied; and c) I was the one occupying the seat. This seemed to do the trick.

I remember that it was more than slightly exasperating when dealing with the reluctance of my nonpilot associates to accept the idea that a 30-hour student pilot had conducted this feat of aerial exploration alone. But this, too, was a rite of passage into the world of flight - a reminder that to fully appreciate it, you gotta be part of it.

So who's incredulous now?

I am.

At how much I had learned even before that day. And at how much more of a pilot I became during that single day. And at how much I still had to learn. Just as I do, and we all do, today. It was one day's trip, but also a pivotal moment in a much longer journey. And that is what you will hear if you ask me to describe the most significant event of my pilot training. I'll tell you about my first solo if you like, but the story of my long cross-country comes first.