benweir.com

Date: September 4, 2008
Aircraft: Cessna 172 - N6253G

Origin: PAO
Destination: KIC, TSP, SMO
Duration: 3.4 hours

I've flown to Mulege, Mexico (816nm), Hillsboro, OR (486nm), and Fallbrook, CA (342nm) but these flights were all with passengers on board. The regulations require pilots to fly a 300+ mile cross country flight solo in order to get a commercial license. This flight must include landings at three different airports. Additionally, one point of landing must be at least a 250nm straight line distance from your original airport. In other words you can't get your 300 miles by flying 150 miles, landing, and then turning around and coming back. This is all excitingly spelled out in 14 CFR 61.129. One more thing that isn't actually specified in the above section of the regulations is that a "cross country" flight is defined as a flight to a point at least 50nm from where you took off. This means that when planning this flight, I couldn't fly a 100 mile leg, a 40 mile leg, and a 180 mile leg since that middle leg is too short.

After considering dozens of combinations of airports, here's what I settled on: PAO-KIC-TSP-SMO. On a map it looks like this:

It's got landings at three airports. As I mentioned in a previous post, the leg lengths are 88, 146, and 68 miles for a total distance of 302 miles. Santa Monica is 273 miles from Palo Alto. In addition to meeting the FAA's requirements, I also wanted to pick airports I'd never been to and ones that I'd otherwise have no reason to visit. I'm trying to visit as many airports as I can and someday I might actually want to make someplace like Santa Barbara or San Luis Obispo an actual destination. That made these places less desirable to visit for purposes of this flight.

Flight there

Since I was going to be flying at least 6 hours this day I didn't want to deal with the extra work of going IFR. Luckily we were in the middle of a heat wave in the Bay Area and I got airborne at 7:56am under clear skies. I picked up flight following to Mesa Del Rey airport in King City but then I dropped off ATC's radar scopes after a while due to the hilly terrain. Surprisingly, my ground track showed up on FlightAware even though I wasn't on an IFR flight.

My first solo cross country, back in 2006, was to Salinas (SNS). I haven't been out in that direction in a long time and it was fun to think how much I've learned about flying in the last 2 1/2 years since then. Flight time to KIC was almost exactly an hour and I did a full stop landing there and bought fuel since I had taken off from Palo Alto without full tanks.

Next it was off across the central valley to Tehachapi. Not much to see along the way. At TSP there was another airplane doing touch and goes. I don't remember the type of aircraft but it looked to be a powered glider of some sort with very high aspect-ratio wings. I did another full stop landing here before taking off again for SMO.

After passing the Lake Hughes VOR, I started to be able to pick up Socal approach on 120.4 and so I called them up for flight following to my destination. They had me pass west of Van Nuys and then handed me off to Santa Monica tower. SMO tower gave me a base entry for runway 21 which was perfect since I was already on an extended base leg for that runway! I followed I-405 down, made a right turn, and touched down gently just past the numbers. It was my smoothest landing of the day.

No lights

I spent the day hanging out with Janelle. By the time I headed home it was dark. My plane had a burned out landing light and a loose wire going to the taxi light. I needed fuel. The fuel pumps were at the other end of the airport. Unlike PAO, the taxiway at SMO is not lighted. This was starting to be a Dilemma. Taxiing around the airport in the dark with no lights seemed like a bad idea. Taking off with low fuel seemed like much worse of an idea. The thought of duct-taping my flashlight to the engine cowling briefly crossed my mind but I didn't have any duct tape!

After pondering my options for a bit, I remembered that in addition to the self-serve fuel, you can also have a guy come out in a truck and fill up the plane for you. This costs about 50 cents a gallon extra at SMO but it doesn't matter since I don't pay for fuel anyway when I rent planes. That would save me a trip to the far end of the airport and back and so I called up the fuel guy who said he'd be there in 10 minutes. This worked out well because it gave me a chance to further prepare for my departure. I was parked pretty close to the takeoff end of the runway and I walked along where I'd have to taxi in the dark. I scouted out where I'd do my run-up and made sure there were taxi center lines to follow the whole way. There is a hangar and a blast wall that have lights on them which ended up providing a surprising amount of illumination.

Also while I waited for the fuel guy, I got out my handheld transciever and got the latest ATIS. I also listened in on the ground frequency to get more familiarized with local procedures since it was a strange airport for me. This gave me time to look at my airport diagram and locate the "southeast runup area" that people kept refering to. This is where I had explored on foot just before. Even though the runup area is right next to the runway, the procedure at SMO is that you have to call up ground control to taxi from one to the other. Just a local quirk that I was glad to be aware of before starting the engine.

The fuel truck arrived and topped me off with about 17 gallons which is almost exactly what my flight planning had told me I would need. Finally it was time to taxi in the dark. It was actually easier than I thought. I was surprised how well the low ambient light reflected off the taxi centerline paint and it showed up fine (albeit faintly) even with no lights on the plane. The runway has edge lights and I stayed in between those on my takeoff roll hoping that there were no stray animals in my way. Wheels up time was about 8:57pm, right before the control tower there closes for the night.

Return Flight

Origin: SMO
Destination: PAO
Duration: 2.8 hours, night

For my flight home, I chose to fly from VOR to VOR along the victor airways at or above the MEAs as if I was on an IFR flight. Advantages of this plan: I am guaranteed terrain clearance without having to chart my own course. It's hard to get lost since I'm using radio navaids instead of landmarks that might be really hard to discern at night. I did realize one disadvantage once I got up in the air.

At this point I realized that everything below me was black. I also realized that the MEA there was 9000' which means the terrain I was overlying was as high as 7000' (2000' of separation). I realized I had no emergency plan for if my engine quit. Sure, I could see lights way off in the distance but they were almost certainly beyond gliding distance. Usually the thought of an engine failure doesn't bother me at all since I practiced those in my early training and got rather used to the idea of the airplane turning into a glider. But on this dark night on which I had just watched the moon set, I actually felt a pang of unease. If my engine was to quit and I had to make a forced landing in rugged, black terrain, I almost certainly wasn't going to survive.

Obviously I didn't die. However next time on an extended night flight I would keep emergency landings in mind when picking my route.