I just got back from a 290nm (one way) trip from KDPA to KANE. I left friday night at about 18:30. It was amazing how much the weather changed during that trip..
It started out partly cloudy with winds 12kts gusting to 25kts, with a barometric pressure of 29.36. I took off on an IFR flight plan to KANE, which was forcasting 2500 foot ceilings and winds 15kts gusting to 20kts. I was flying into a headwind of about 35kts, so my ground speed was about 100kts. As I was handed off to Rockford approach control (KRFD), they asked if I had a storm scope (which I did). I looked at it and it was lit up like a Christmas tree in front of me. I asked Rockford approach for a deviation to the west to avoid that storm (I was able to start seeing the storm at that time also). I was still about 45nm from the the storm and there was plenty of room to the west to get around it. While flying westbound I started to encounter some hard updrafts and downdrafts in the 500ft/min range. I asked for a block altitude (5000-6000ft msl) to maintain while dealing with the turbulent air. They granted it and I tried to maintain about 5500 ft. I never went outside of that block although I did come pretty close. After clearing the storm to the west it was again partly cloudy and the sun was shining bright. It looked like it was going to be a much nicer flight the rest of the way. I flew through puffy white clouds the rest of the way up to the Minneapolis area. About 50nm from KANE approach control had me decend from 6000ft to 4000ft. This put me in the clouds and in some moderately turbulent air. I was easily able to maintain altitude and the general heading, but was being bumped around enough that the "gear unsafe" light would come on every time I hit a good bump. At one point, it actually stayed on and I had to slow to about 90kts and extend the gear and then retract the gear to get the light to go out. After about 30 minutes of this approach control decended me to 2700ft which put me about 100ft above the cloud bottoms, I asked for another decent to 2500ft to get me in VMC, which they granted. I then was easily able to spot the airport and started heading in that direction and was preparing to land on runway 36. The winds were reported at 18kts gusting to 34kts from a heading of 350 and a barometric pressure of about 29.86. I was second to land behind a small twin coming from the other direction. I watched him land and was satisified that it would not be a difficult landing. I put it down with about 10kts extra airspeed and made a halfway decent landing. The return trip could not have been any easier.. winds were calm at both airports and aloft, there were no clouds and there was no turbulence the entire flight. Between trimming the aircraft out and putting on the autopilot, I could have easily taken a nap for 2 hours. Instead I spent time playing around with some of the features of the Garmin 430 GPS that the aircraft had along with figuring out which RPM setting got me the best bang for the buck. 2100 RPMs won, because I pay by the tach hour, not the hobbs meter. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of David Megginson Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2003 6:19 PM To: FlightGear developers discussions Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Trip Report and Pictures: CYOW-CYAM;CYAM-CYYB; CYYB-CYOW matthew Law writes: > Just brings home how small the UK is compared to Canada and the USA. > From my home airfield, 800nm in almost any direction by my reckoning > would land you in another country. That was 800nm round trip (i.e. 400nm out and 400nm back), but it is true that 800nm straight west from Ottawa probably wouldn't be enough to get me over the provincial border into Manitoba border. One of my nearer-term goals is to visit all three coasts. From Ottawa, it's 515nm east to Halifax on the Atlantic Ocean, 1917nm west to Vancouver on the Pacific Ocean, and 1682nm northwest to Cambridge Bay on the Arctic Ocean. > Although a C-152 would have ran out of fuel after 600nm probably. Probably considerably less. At 75% power, my Warrior could probably manage 600nm and still just barely have the required 30-minute fuel reserve, but I'm not tempted to try. > Did you see much variation in weather over the distance? Yes, even over 400nm, the changes were quite dramatic. All the best, David -- David Megginson, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.megginson.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
