Memories: Cross-country

His statement struck a chord. In August 1999, I’d made a similar trip and had the same reaction. While I’d done many cross-country legs, the most educational flying I ever did was across the country—California to Virginia—in a Piper Cherokee.

It started with a phone call. A partner in the airplane had flown it to Santa Monica, California, intending to return it to its base at Manassas, Virginia, within a week or two. Once in California, he decided to stay awhile and didn’t want the airplane unavailable to the rest of us. Would I be interested, he asked, in taking a commercial flight to Los Angeles and flying the airplane back to Virginia?

I said yes before my brain could wrap itself around the enormity of this commitment. It wasn’t until after I hung up that I began to worry about the details. How would I navigate Los Angeles airspace? How would I cross the continental divide? What if something went wrong with the airplane? Suddenly, a trip that had seemed like a great adventure felt like a massive beast with horns and teeth, and the 330 flight hours I’d amassed to date seemed woefully inadequate.

In a stroke of luck, it turned out my good friend and fellow pilot, Eric Laing, was going to be in California for a conference and had planned to fly back on the day I would be departing Santa Monica. Naturally, we decided he should come along. Having two pilots in the cockpit made the trip feel slightly less daunting, but even with two of us, the trip stretched our skills. Between planning routes over entirely new territory, dodging summer thunderstorms, and figuring out procedures at unfamiliar airports, we were jettisoned outside our comfort zones. Most of my hours had been built within a 250-mile radius of Washington, D.C. While there were definite airspace challenges there, I had developed a certain level of comfort in my corner of the world. Being pushed out of it forced me to grow as a pilot.

For instance, talking with D.C.-area controllers was never easy, but it was at least familiar. LAX seemed far more daunting—another level entirely. In successfully communicating with Los Angeles controllers, I became truly confident in my ability to talk with ATC. At West Woodward Airport in Oklahoma, we had to manage a challenging crosswind landing. Had the winds been that strong at home, I wouldn’t have risked the flight, but we had to land. So we did. And we walked away from the airplane a little taller because of it.

Then there was the terrain. Coming out of Sedona, Arizona, perched at 4,830 feet, it felt like the terrain was rising faster than our airplane’s paltry 200-feet-per-minute climb. We’d done the calculations and knew, intellectually, that we should be fine, but I’d never kept such a keen eye on the ground, and it turned out our calculations were reliable. Past the craggy, desolate scenery of Arizona and eastern New Mexico, the landscape melted toward sea level as we crossed into Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. It was such a gradual falling away, almost as if the airplane were climbing, but instead the ground was receding—and slowly softening from rugged desert to open prairie, sprawling farmland, then rich green forest. Never in my life had I experienced North America like this.

While I could fly an airplane, it wasn’t until I navigated my way across the entire country that I felt like I really was a pilot. Such a journey can’t help but change you. With summer coming, it’s the ideal time to explore our country for yourself. Go ahead—point your nose in whatever direction will take you to the most distant coast, and discover for yourself a whole new meaning to the term “cross-country.”