Josef “Jeff” Sipek

First Solo Cross-Country

A week ago (June 15), I went on my first solo cross country flight. The plan was to fly KARBKMBSKAMN → KARB. In case you don’t happen to have the Detroit sectional chart in front of you, this might help you visualize the scope of the flight.

leg distance time
KARB → KMBS 79 nm 47 min
KMBS → KAMN 29 nm 20 min
KAMN → KARB 79 nm 46 min
Total 187 nm 113 min

Here’s the ground track (as recorded by the G1000) along with red dots for each of my checkpoints and a pink line connecting them. (Sadly, there’s no convenient zoom level that covers the entire track without excessive waste.)

ground track

As you can see, I didn’t quite overfly all the checkpoints. In my defense, the forecast winds were about 40 degrees off from reality during the first half of the flight. :)

Let’s examine each leg separately.

KARB → KMBS

ground track

My checkpoint by I-69 (southwest of Flint) was supposed to be a I-69 and Pontiac VORTAC (PSI) radial 311 intersection. However when I called up the FSS briefer, I found out that it was out of service. Thankfully, Salem VORTAC (SVM) is very close so I just used its radial 339 instead. Next time I’m using a VOR for any part of my planning, I’m going to check for any NOTAMs before I make it part of my plan — redoing portions of the plan is tedious and not fun.

On the way to Saginaw, I was planning to go at 3500. (Yes, I know, it is a westerly direction and the rule (FAR 91.159) says even thousand + 500, but the clouds were not high enough to fly at 4500 and the rule only applies 3000 AGL and above — the ground around these parts is 700-1000 feet MSL.)

altitude

Right when I entered the downwind for runway 23, the tower cleared me to land. My clearance was quickly followed by the tower instructing a commuter jet to hold short of 23 because of landing traffic — me! Somehow, it is very satisfying to see a real plane (CRJ-200) have to wait for little ol’ me to land. (FlightAware tells me that it was FLG3903 flight to KDTW.)

While I was on taxiway C, they got cleared to take off. I couldn’t help it but to snap a photo.

CRJ-200

It was a pretty slow day for Saginaw. The whole time I was on the radio with Saginaw approach, I got to hear maybe 5 planes total. The tower was even less busy. There were no planes around except for me and the commuter jet.

KMBS → KAMN

This leg of the flight was the hardest. First of all, it was only 29 nm. This equated to about 25 minutes of flying. The first four-ish and the last five-ish were spent climbing and descending, so really there was about 15 minutes of cruising. Not much time to begin with. I flew this leg by following the MBS VOR radial 248. My one and only checkpoint on this leg was mid way — the beginning of a wind turbine farm. It took about 2 minutes longer to get there than planned, but the wind turbines were easy to see from distance so no problems there.

ground track

Following the VOR wasn’t difficult, but you can see in the ground track that I was meandering across it. As expected, it got easier the farther away from the station I got. Here’s the plot of the CDI deflection for this leg. The CSV file says that the units are “fsd” — I have no idea what that means.

CDI deflection

I can’t really draw any conclusions because…well, I don’t know what the graph is telling me. Sure, it seems to get closer and closer to zero (which I assume is a good thing), but I can’t honestly say that I understand what the graph is saying.

The most difficult part was trying to stay at 2500 feet. For whatever reason, it felt like I was flying in sizable thermals. Since there were no thunderstorms in the area, I flew on fighting the updrafts. That was the difficult part. I suspect the wind turbines were built there because the area is windy.

altitude

KAMN is a decent size airport. Two plenty long runways for a 172 even on a hot day (5004x75 feet and 3197x75 feet). I didn’t stop by the FBO, so I have no idea how they are. I did not notice anyone else around during the couple of minutes I spent on the ground taxiing and getting ready for the next leg. Maybe it was just the overcast that made people stay indoors. Oh well. It is a nice airport, and I wouldn’t mind stopping there in the future if the need arose.

KAMN → KARB

Flying back to Ann Arbor was the easy part of the trip. The air calmed down enough that once trimmed, the plane more or less stayed at 3500 feet.

altitude

It apparently was a slow day for Lansing approach as well, as I got to hear a controller chatting with a pilot of a skydiving plane about how fast the skydivers fell to the ground. Sadly, I didn’t get to hear the end of the conversation since the controller told me to contact Detroit approach.

As far as the ground track is concerned, you can see two places where I stopped flying current heading and instead flew toward the next checkpoint visually. The first instance is a few miles north of KOZW. I spotted the airport, and since I knew I was supposed to overfly it, I turned to it and flew right over it. The second instance is by Whitmore Lake — there I looked into the distance and saw Ann Arbor. Knowing that the airport is on the south side, I just headed right toward it ignoring the planned heading. As I mentioned before in both cases, the planned course was slightly off because the winds weren’t quite like the forecast said they would be.

ground track

You can’t tell from the rather low resolution of the map, but I got to fly right over the Wikipedia article: Michigan stadium. Sadly, I was a bit too busy flying the plane to take a photo of the field below me.

Next

With one solo cross country out of the way, I’m still trying to figure out where I want to go next. Currently, I am considering one of these flights (in no particular order):

path distance time
KARB KGRR KMOP KARB 239 nm 2h19m
KARB KBIV KJXN KARB 220 nm 2h08m
KARB KFWA KTOL KARB 210 nm 2h03m
KARB CRUXX KFWA KTOL KARB 210 nm 2h06m
KARB LFD KFWA KTOL KARB 225 nm 2h12m
KARB KAZO KOEB KTOL KARB 207 nm 2h01m
KARB KMBS KGRR KARB 243 nm 2h21m
KARB KGRR KEKM KARB 266 nm 2h40m

Garmin G1000 Data Logging: Cross-Country Edition

About a week ago, I talked about G1000 data logging. In that post, I mentioned that cross-country flying would be interesting to visualize. Well, on Friday I got to do a mock pre-solo cross country phase check. I had the G1000 logging the trip.

First of all, the plan was to fly from KARB to KFPK. It’s a 51nm trip. I had four checkpoints. For the purposes of plotting the flight, I had to convert the pencil marks on my sectional chart to latitude and longitude.

> xc_checkpoints
          Name Latitude Longitude
1      Chelsea 42.31667 -84.01667
2       Munith 42.37500 -84.20833
3       Leslie 42.45000 -84.43333
4 Eaton Rapids 42.51667 -84.65833

First of all, let’s take a look at the ground track.

ground track

In addition to just the ground track, I plotted here the first three checkpoints in red, the location of the plane every 5 minutes in blue (excluding all the data points near the airport), and some other places of interest in green.

As you can see, I was always a bit north of where I was supposed to be. Right after passing Leslie, I was told to divert to 69G. I figured out the true course, and tried to take the wind into account, but as you can see it didn’t go all that well at first. When I found myself next to some oil tanks way north of where I wanted to be, I turned southeast…a little bit too much. Eventually, I made it to Richmond which was, much like all grass fields, way too hard to spot. (I’m pretty sure that I will avoid all grass fields while on my solo cross countries.)

So, how about the altitude? The plan was to fly at 4500 feet, but due to clouds being at about 3500, Wikipedia article: pilotage being the purpose of this exercise, and not planning on going all the way to KFPK anyway, we just decided to stay at 3000. At one point, 3000 seemed like a bit too close to the clouds, so I ended up at 2900. Below is the altitude graph. For your convenience, I plotted horizontal lines at 2800, 2900, 3000, and 3100 feet. (Near the end, you can see 4 touch and gos and a full stop at KARB.)

altitude

While approaching my second checkpoint, Munith, I realized that it will be pretty hard to find. It’s a tiny little town, but sadly it is the biggest “landmark” around. So, I tuned in the JXN Wikipedia article: VOR and estimated that the 50 degree radial would go through Munith. While that wouldn’t give me my location, it would tell me when I was abeam Munith. Shortly after, I changed my estimate to the 60 degree radial. (It looks like 65 is the right answer.)

> summary(factor(data$NAV1))
109.6 114.3 
 3192  1406 
> summary(factor(data$CRS))
  36   37   42   44   47   48   49   50   52   57   59   60 
1444    1    1    1    1    1    1  135    1    1    1 3010 
> head(subset(data, HSIS=="NAV1")$Time, 1)
[1] "2013-05-31 09:43:23 EDT"
> head(subset(data, NAV1==109.6)$Time, 1)
[1] "2013-05-31 09:43:42 EDT"
> head(subset(data, CRS==50)$Time, 1)
[1] "2013-05-31 09:44:26 EDT"
> head(subset(data, CRS==60)$Time, 1)
[1] "2013-05-31 09:46:48 EDT"

When I got the plane, the NAV1 radio was tuned to 114.3 (SVM) with the 36 degree radial set. At 9:43:25, I switched the input for the HSI from GPS to NAV1; at 9:43:42, I tuned into 109.6 (JXN). 44 seconds later, I had the 50 degree radial set. Over two minutes later, I changed my mind and set the 60 degree radial, which stayed there for the remainder of the flight.

In my previous post about the G1000 data logging abilities, I mentioned that the engine related variables would be more interesting on a cross-country. Let’s take a look.

engine RPM

As you can see, when reaching 3000 feet (cf. the altitude graph) I pulled the power back to a cruise setting. Then I started leaning the mixture.

fuel flow

Interestingly, just pulling the power back causes a large saving of fuel. Leaning helped save about one gallon/hour. While that’s not bad (~11%), it is not as significant as I thought it would be.

fuel

Since there was nowhere near as much maneuvering as previously, the fuel quantity graphs look way more useful. Again, we can see that the left tank is being used more.

The cylinder head temperature and exhaust gas temperature graphs are mostly boring. Unlike the previous graphs of CHT and EGT these clearly show a nice 30 minute long period of cruising. To be honest, I thought these graphs would be more interesting. I’ll probably keep plotting them in the future but not share them unless they show something interesting.

cylinder head temperature exhaust gas temperature

Same goes for the oil pressure and temperature graphs. They are kind of dull.

oil pressure oil temperature

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hopefully, next time I’ll try to look at how close the plan was to reality.

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