Cross Country Flight
I have got a great training session for you this time, my first instructor led cross country flight!
For me this is a milestone, in that I fly for the longest I have flown so far (almost 2 hours straight).
Let’s jump right into the particulars of a cross country flight.
In order for this training flight to qualify as a cross country I had to at minimum:
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- Fly (helicopter or airplane) 25 nm (nautical miles) from my home airport and land.
- Then take off and return to my home airport and land.
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This was a stressful (but fun) trip. You may notice I am always asking questions and verifying information. This is because my instructor Victor is leaving the decision-making choices up to me. I am flying the ship, navigating, performing radio calls (monitoring), and then dealing for the first time with a small but super busy airport and its airspace. It’s a lot to manage!
All in all, this was amazingly super fun! Cross country flights are the most fun to me, it’s what flying a helicopter (or airplane) is all about, having an adventure!
On this particular cross country, it was also my first time at flight planning. I had to determine the best course for VFR (visual flight rules, no instruments) using speed, time, and distance to known waypoints (landmarks) and dead reckoning which is looking out at chosen landmarks.
My first task was to determine the flight path. A lot can go into this such as obstacles, controlled airspaces, availability of emergency landing areas, weight of fully loaded aircraft and the fuel expended.
Here is a visual of my flight plan:
There is a great flight planner that helps with all the calculations, especially wind corrected headings. In flight I only use the right half of the chart as it has my destination and waypoints, headings, and time in flight.
Here is a copy of my computations for wind corrected compass headings, time in flight per way point, as well as fuel consumption:
All this info went onto my kneeboard. In flying helicopters and airplanes pilots use a kneeboard strapped to their leg to hold important information about the flight such as: VFR maps, enroute and destination information (radio frequencies, headings, etc..). This was also the first time I had a chance to manage the knee board and its information. I learned a lot about keeping you’re the most important info close at hand. Not to mention, we fly with doors off the helicopter, so thing get whipped around pretty often.
Picture of my knee board from Flyboys Supplies:
Eventually, I can use my iPad mini and Foreflight, which will make flight planning and in-flight management much easier!
The video is just an unedited version of my experience and is long… but hey it’s an adventure!