First Solo Cross Country Coming Up--Advice?

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rt4388

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rt4388
Any advice for my first solo cross country? Its coming up on Wednesday. I feel super comfortable about it, but I'm just curious if anyone has any unique advice/tips/quirks for cross country flying. Thanks guys!
 
If you think you have gone too far but missed even though everything seemed right, keep going. :lol:;)
 
Organize yourself -
Know ALL of your frequencies.
LISTEN to ATC - Maybe you're used to your instructor being your "second set of ears".
I always used to say I was a student pilot when flying solo, controllers seemed a bit more forgiving. "Charlotte Approach, Diamond N11ZM, Student Pilot blah blah blah"
Constantly check your clock and compare it to your NavLog times, anticipate the time you will fly over your next checkpoint to keep yourself one step ahead.
Constantly monitor your engine instruments and make sure everything is "in the green".
Dont forget to re-adjust your heading indicator using your magnetic compass AND dont forget to set your altimeter as it changes.
Study your destination airport, assume you'll be landing at a certain runway and pre-plan how you will enter the pattern, etc..

I know a lot of this is something you should do anyways, but in the excitement and "new" experience, some things can slip your mind.
Most important, relax, be safe and have freaking fun!!
 
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1) within the legal limits of w&b, there is no such thing as too much fuel onboard. Top that sucker up!

2) if in doubt, ask ATC for help.

Even if it's something as simple as mailing your nav but not seeing the airport- swallowing your pride for a quick radio call beats an embarrassing incident or an ntsb report.
 
If atc makes you do something you're not comfortable with say "student pilot, unable."
I had one controller ask me to do a short approach because a citation was coming in. It didn't hurt to extend downwind
 
Adamoh said:
If atc makes you do something you're not comfortable with say "student pilot, unable."
I had one controller ask me to do a short approach because a citation was coming in. It didn't hurt to extend downwind
Click to expand...

I had ATC advise (after they called my base turn) "caution wake turbulence" on one of my earliest solos. They weren't kidding - I was #2 in a PA28-140, following a "heavy" MD-80! (Wasn't really cross country, it was the airport (KONT) whose Class C my primary training airport's Delta was directly under - KCNO.) So I asked if I could extend my downwind both to give the turbulence some time to dissipate, but also to let me watch the flight (AA1505) ahead of me land, so I could aim past the point where the nosewheel touched...

I've had the same Charlie controller stay with me on frequency until I had visual contact with my next airport (there are several small airports in the immediate vicinity), after I told them I was "unfamiliar." I hear a lot of student pilots who almost seem to be afraid of comms, like ATC is going to scold them if they don't make a perfect radio call with all the right lingo. Just ask for what you want/need, even if it's a little embarrassing... IMHO. With situational awareness of course - I wouldn't ask a controller at LAX for anything except Bravo clearance through the mini-route. :)
 
Check way points that you will not have problems identifying. Don't panic if your time is off on reaching the way points. Enjoy the ride,remember ATC is there to help if you get lost or have a problem. Good luck ,enjoy.
 
Plot your route on Google Earth, and "fly" it at your proposed altitude back and forth, as many times as you can, without any identifying labels. Learn to recognize all your selected landmarks from different angles. Once you feel confident, remove the route line and "fly" the route using those landmarks *only* (no additional help). Once you get good at it, you should need no sectionals or GPS or anything else but your eyes to get from A to B, just like walking to the bathroom at home or driving to the corner store. You should recognize an off-course drift/heading and correct for it immediately.
For bonus points, drop yourself randomly anywhere in the region and try to find the way home (with no labels or plotted route line, of course). You can cheat by increasing the altitude as your "help line", but you lose points for every extra 1000 foot increment above your proposed level, and get extra bonus for being lower than planned when "lost".
I did all my heli cross country training flights this way (no VOR/GPS installed), and never opened a sectional (I had the frequencies and runways written on a piece of paper on my knee). Not only does this method make the flight easy, but much more enjoyable too.
 
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wow. After reading all the 'advice' maybe you should cancel :D I'm exhausted from merely reading it.

OK, well why don't you just go do it tomorrow and forget about all that super preparation. If common sense and your ground school are not enough to get you across a few miles of countryside, it's all over.

Just do it - and enjoy
 
Enjoy the flight. It's the first time you will feel like a real pilot. When safe to do so, snap a few pictures along the way. I did and I still look back on them with pride some 700 pictures later!
 
RotorDude said:
Plot your route on Google Earth, and "fly" it at your proposed altitude back and forth, as many times as you can, without any identifying labels. Learn to recognize all your selected landmarks from different angles. Once you feel confident, remove the route line and "fly" the route using those landmarks *only* (no additional help). Once you get good at it, you should need no sectionals or GPS or anything else but your eyes to get from A to B, just like walking to the bathroom at home or driving to the corner store. You should recognize an off-course drift/heading and correct for it immediately.
For bonus points, drop yourself randomly anywhere in the region and try to find the way home (with no labels or plotted route line, of course). You can cheat by increasing the altitude as your "help line", but you lose points for every extra 1000 foot increment above your proposed level, and get extra bonus for being lower than planned when "lost".
I did all my heli cross country training flights this way (no VOR/GPS installed), and never opened a sectional (I had the frequencies and runways written on a piece of paper on my knee). Not only does this method make the flight easy, but much more enjoyable too.
Click to expand...

I don't think it's realistic to memorize every route. It can get you in trouble in complex airspace.

You won't have Google Earth in the plane, but you will eventually need to divert. It makes more sense to learn to correlate sectional with landmarks. And that's a big part of the point of a solo cross country.

Do what you did in your dual cross country, just solo.
 
What I remember from my solo cross-countries was that my flights took longer than I expected and it was a real pain to find a few spare moments to open and close my flight plans. When I called to close the first one, they might have just started looking for me as I was reminded to close promptly and what trouble it causes if I don't.

So if you're filing flight plans, make sure you've left yourself enough time for a headwind and for ground ops if you're closing by phone. ;)

That feeling of successfully navigating to an unknown airport for the first time was wonderful. It was the second best experience after my first discovery flight.
 
Good luck! A few random lessons I learned on my first solos:

1) Small airports can be really hard to distinguish sometimes and don't always make the best visual checkpoints even though they stand out on the sectional

2) same goes for a lot of roads in the sectional... in reality there are a lot more roads than appear on the sectional so they're usually not as obvious in real life. Major interstates are usually fine but some random road they decided to draw on the map is often hard to distinguish from the other 2 adjacent roads they didn't draw

3) Lakes are bad landmarks in winter (in the north) since a frozen lake and a frozen field look exactly the same when covered in snow!

4) If its the first time you've flown a route use Goggle maps to check out any visual landmarks so you know what they actually look like from the air (although see above note about things looking different in winter)

5) Get flight following. If you have flight following then no real need to open up a VFR flight plan

6) if there's a GPS in the airplane don't "cheat" and just follow the magenta line. It's a useful skill, and quite fun, to navigate the old school way.

7) if it makes sense for the route, make a leg or two follow a VOR. Never hurts to have some practice tracking radials

8) make sure you are familiar with the orientation of the airport upon arrival... especially if you're not arriving from the south. If your not prepared it's easy to get runways confused if you're not familiar with the airport

9) every airport has local lingo and procedures that aren't formally published anywhere (but the tower may expect you to know). If the tower tells you to do something you're not familiar with or asks you to head to an unfamiliar landmark don't hestitate to just say you're new to the airport and would like a bit of extra help. They'll be happy to guide you along.

Finally, have fun!
 
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Don't overthink this. It's just another flight that's well within the fuel range of the airplane. It's a learning experience - be prepared to visually orient yourself to the rwy layout, listen for other traffic and build a mental picture, remember your training, don't expect everything to be perfect.

My biggest hurdle when going to unfamiliar airports was the different visual cues I had gotten so used to at my home airport - turn downwind over that barn, turn base at that water tower (those kind of things) - even though my CFI kept trying to break me of that. When I went to unfamiliar airports I was still relying on those kind of things and then they were gone - so it wasn't uncommon for me to do some very sloppy patterns and approaches.

My airplane didn't have GPS, so it was charts, VORs, and landmarks and that was just fine with me.
 
Henning said:
Green highlighter is better, works under red light as well.
Click to expand...

HA - I found out about that the hard way. My first night cross country I used a magenta marker on my sectional to mark my route. No GPS in the plane. When I turned on the red light the line disappeared!!
 
MAKG1 said:
I don't think it's realistic to memorize every route. It can get you in trouble in complex airspace.

You won't have Google Earth in the plane, but you will eventually need to divert. It makes more sense to learn to correlate sectional with landmarks. And that's a big part of the point of a solo cross country.

Do what you did in your dual cross country, just solo.
Click to expand...

The idea is *not* to (critically) depend on anything but your own eyes and brain.
So for your typical VFR student training CC, you can easily commit to memory your route and surrounding region, the latter from a higher altitude for at least a general idea in case a diversion is needed (or you get lost).
As I noted in my message above, I used this technique successfully for my heli training CC's and was rewarded by much more pleasure than my original fixed wing CC's years earlier (where I relied on sectionals plus VOR, since GPS was yet to be born).
For normal A to B flying, I use GPS, but when flying to a new place, even IFR, I still use that technique the day before to get to know the lay of the land (in addition to the normal AFDs and sectionals). Obviously if it's VFR I'd put more emphasis on this recon than IFR, and if it's a long leg (hundreds of miles) the memorization of every landmark becomes impractical, although a 30,000 foot run-through on GE is still useful. But then I don't think student CC's typically go that far.
 
Never leave an airport without making a bathroom stop (unless you're carrying one).

Rule learned the hard way on my first x-country.
 
airdale said:
Never leave an airport without making a bathroom stop (unless you're carrying one).

Rule learned the hard way on my first x-country.
Click to expand...

Not an issue yet, but make sure passengers do it, too.

Especially kids.

Believe me, it sucks to hear "I gotta go NOW" from the back seat at 5000 feet.

And it's not even small kids. I had a teenager pull that on me a few weeks ago in the run up area at Oakland. Not fun to taxi against traffic back to the FBO at a busy Class C. At least the guys at Kaiser were helpful.
 
This will likely be more fun and satisfying than your first solo. You'll have plenty of time to contemplate your navel and recognize that you actually know what you're doing. It's a great feeling.

As others have said, use GPS only as a last resort. Master the art of waypoints, heading, and time. And without a doubt, use Flight Following. Not only do they help you watch for other traffic, they can steer back you if you get off course.

Enjoy!
 
Which airports? There has to be somebody here with a story about them!
 
RotorDude said:
Plot your route on Google Earth, and "fly" it at your proposed altitude back and forth, as many times as you can, without any identifying labels. Learn to recognize all your selected landmarks from different angles. Once you feel confident, remove the route line and "fly" the route using those landmarks *only* (no additional help). Once you get good at it, you should need no sectionals or GPS or anything else but your eyes to get from A to B, just like walking to the bathroom at home or driving to the corner store. You should recognize an off-course drift/heading and correct for it immediately.
For bonus points, drop yourself randomly anywhere in the region and try to find the way home (with no labels or plotted route line, of course). You can cheat by increasing the altitude as your "help line", but you lose points for every extra 1000 foot increment above your proposed level, and get extra bonus for being lower than planned when "lost".
I did all my heli cross country training flights this way (no VOR/GPS installed), and never opened a sectional (I had the frequencies and runways written on a piece of paper on my knee). Not only does this method make the flight easy, but much more enjoyable too.
Click to expand...

For more bonus points, have the sectional in your lap and compare the way features are drawn on a sectional, and how they appear in nature. You'll find that the sectionals are very well drawn in detail useful when looking down and out from an airplane. Part of the whole exercise of flying cross countries is to develop this very skill set; to be able to place yourself on a sectional (or whatever chart you're working off) by reference to what you see out the window.

Some of us also hold the chart "heads up" regardless of print orientation, it may make things easier for you or not. Try it and see what you think.

In real life, 99% of the time you will be using some GPS device. The problem is, the other 1% you still need to know how to manage without it and get to an airport before you run out of fuel. It's really not that hard.
 
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Something else to do, along Henning's line of comparing what's on the sectional with what your eyeballs are seeing - verify each waypoint with multiple landmarks. It teaches you to not make assumptions of what you are seeing, and you will have to learn to compare what's on the sectional with what's on the ground.

"There's that radio antenna that I chose as a waypoint... I think... Yeah, there's the RR running next to it, and the powerline just to the north, that that county road with the bend in it on the other side." That kind of thing.
 
Would it be a bad idea to go somewhere I've never been before? I'm feeling pretty comfortable with KGRD because I've been there before. So I'm thinking about "challenging" myself and going somewhere new for my first solo cc.
 
That's a good question for your CFI, and the CFIs here.

On my long solo XC I went to airports that I hadn't seen before.

On my short XC: My CFI and I did a dual night XC to an airport I had not been to. We taxied off onto the ramp and I got a little lesson from my CFI about the layout, the windsock location, and any other features of interest.

Then, maybe my next flight, I did a solo XC to that same airport. Doing it first at night meant I couldn't use any visual features from memory for navigation or whatever. So it was an interesting way to get me familiar with the physical layout of the airport, but have to do daylight navigation to get there and back.
 
rt4388 said:
Would it be a bad idea to go somewhere I've never been before? I'm feeling pretty comfortable with KGRD because I've been there before. So I'm thinking about "challenging" myself and going somewhere new for my first solo cc.
Click to expand...

Not particularly. Plan the flight you want to do and present it to your CFI.
 
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