Flew my first cross-country flight today (note: not a solo – Willis was in the plane with me). Route was KBMG (Bloomington/Monroe Airport) to KRID (Richmond, IN airport) by way of Franklin, IN, then KRID to KOKK (Kokomo) direct, then KOKK to KBMG by way of North Salem. The two non-direct legs were to avoid the Camp Atterbury restricted airspace and Indianapolis International class C airspace, respectively. Total distance was 257 miles and total time in flight was a bit over 4 hours, although that includes two stops (Richmond and Kokomo) to warm up a bit before heading on our way.
Weather was reasonable, but cold. Winds aloft were 11 knots from 230 degrees at 300′ and 15 knots from 300 degrees. We cruised the first leg at 3500′ MSL and the second two at 3000′ MSL since we didn’t want to climb to 4500′ and fight an even less favorable wind. At 3000′, the outside air temperature was about 15 degrees Fahrenheit, and the heat in the Cessna 150 isn’t up to that fight, so we could see our breathe for a good chunk of the flight. Visibility was probably 20-25 miles when we started, but slowly got worse as the day went on. It was probably only slightly above 10 miles when we arrived back in Bloomington. Sky was clear for most of the flight, so we at least had some sun to try to warm up the plane. Indiana is still a bit dead, since it is winter and all, but the view was pretty impressive the whole flight. It’s amazing how many trees we have in this state.
Willis has his students do the first cross country flight by pilotage and dead reckoning, meaning no radio navigation and no GPS to help us on our way. Indiana has a decent number of roads and towns, so it’s not too bad – about every 5 minutes we had a landmark to verify our position. And the winds were calm enough that most of my estimates were +/- 1 minute arrival time. There’s no center console between pilot and copilot in the C-150, so it is a bit cramped trying to juggle sectional maps, a wiz-wheel, and the flight log sheets. It took some trial and error before I had a decent handle on the juggling act, but I was pretty comfortable with it in the end. I was worried about being able to do calculations on the wiz-wheel, as I can never figure out the complicated ones when I’m trying to practice with it. But since all I needed was basic time/distance/speed conversion and wind correction angles, it wasn’t too bad at all. And navigation by pilotage (ground reference) was much easier than I expected. After four hours in the air, however, I was extremely happy to spot the airport, and even happier to be able to make a direct approach from the north onto runway 17, skipping the whole time-consuming pattern thing. The warmth of the FBO was calling to me and 17 has dual color VASI lights, so it’s a pretty hard approach to screw up, even when not flying a downwind or base leg.
I’m not yet an expert in Google Earth, so I don’t know how to make perdy lines, but here’s a fairly simple map of our intended route. I didn’t have my GPS running while I was in the plane, so I don’t have a more accurate flight path. Maybe next time.
- Always write down the runway configuration at airports you don’t know by heart when preflight planning. It’s kind of embarrassing to have to announce over the radio “7 miles to the southwest for a landing to the southwest” because you can’t remember if KRID’s runway is 23 or 24 (it’s 24, by the way).
- Woven running gloves do not have enough grip to easily use a wiz-wheel.
- N66591 cruises at about 110 *MPH*, not knots. Recalculating wind correction while trying to climb out of KBMG because you screwed this up is a pain.
- If you don’t see chocks on the tarmac, look for them hanging on the fence before asking the FBO manager or he looks at you like you’re blind.