Trip Planning

In April 2004 I plan to fly my longest crosscountry flight so far. I'll start in California, fly to Florida and then back using more southerly route. I plan to travel together with my girlfriend Marta, who will join me in Los Angeles. We plan to sleep on on-airport camping sites where possible.

We will travel in non turbocharged 1980 Cessna 172, rented from Anglo-American Aviation. This is the place where I trained for my PPL in April 2003.

As for new stuff, I plan to buy Lowrance Airmap 500 and test it on the way. :-) This is also my first real trip including living in tents, so I had to buy quite a lot of things. ;-)

On March, 29th I posted message on rec.aviation.piloting, asking for suggestions. Here is news thread with responses. Thanks! I'll use it for changing route ASAP :-)

Some suggestions I'm thinking about:

• Rething route over canyons. Too much too see :-)
• And rething camping places there. I promised Marta some touring on foot, so we need to stop nearby park, on the other hand there are no camping places on airport and they are expensive...
• Fly over Monument Valley
• Think about skipping Grand Canyon (lot's of restrictions)
• Stop on northern side of Smoky Mountains
• Change airport in Charleston
• Stop in St. Augustine (though about this before)
• Visit Johnson Space Center in Houston (flying nearby on way back anyway)
• Stop on BOTH T27 and 2E5, now it's broken below ;-)

Will have to talk those over with Marta. Four weeks is not much for actually seeing half of US, so we have to choose... But for weeks is almost as much vacation as we can take here - we have 26 working days per year available.

Map

Route

This is my current route plan, created with Jeppesen FliteStar VFR. Of course it does not generate such listings itself...

Of course it's very preliminary and will change depending on weather and last minute changes... In case of really bad weather on the way it can change a lot. ;-)

Although I modified my "real" plan with above suggestions, I haven't really had time to update following listings... Things went pretty fast this week.