Detour on the Roadtrip

I've had to take a short break on the road trip and return to Vancouver to attend to some personal things, so Bob will be playing the Willie Nelson tapes solo in C-FPAK for a while. I'll be rejoining him shortly to continue the roadtrip back, but I'll be bring some "Box Car Willie 8-tracks" for the way back. Bob will try and get further east, but it will be dependant on the weather as the last post shows.

The stay in Thunder bay was needed because the the four day dash from Boundary Bay to Thunder Bay was pretty tiring. Flying in the rough air and high temperatures does make it more draining, but there's all the up front planning required when you're flying in a totally new geographic area where you arent familiar with the locations mentioned in NOTAM's or METAR/TAF reports.

Some other things we found so far were;

• using the fuel consumption figures in the POH is optimistic. For FPAK, the figure in the POH is 7.6 US Gallons/Hour at 65% power setting, but we are getting a little over 8 gallons per hour leaned as per the POH.
• similarly, the fuel consumption for the climb is optimistic.
• check fuel prices at airports in advance. This can be found at the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association (COPA) web page, and you can get significant savings if you can plan it out ahead of time.
• having Internet access at your stops is invaluable. You can check the weather, NOTAMS, GFA's, etc., the night before your flight to get a reasonable idea of the next days weather, then check the current data just before the flight against the previous nights info. We also can check the Weather Office (Environment Canada) site for the current and predicted conditions for cities along a route where the are no METAR's aor TAF's available. It certianly makes things a lot easier.
• we have an EXCEL spreadsheet Navigation Log we designed where we just eneter in the route the night before, then update it with winds from the FD's and any other pertinenet info. This has been really usefull for flight planning purposes as well as use enroute.
• Bob bought in inexpensive ink jet printer to take along so he can print the Nav Log out after the final data in the Nav Log has been updated. That way we have a Nav Log plus printed weather info without ever having to be depend on the NavCanada kiosks. It's also a lot quicker than transcribing data by hand.
• all that map reading an navigation stuff they teach you in Ground School, well it really is usefull when your flying on the prairies and in Ontario. Its not like flying around Vancouver where landmarks are relatively easy to indentify.
• practice your cross wind landings. I dont think we've landed yet where there wasn't at good crosswind component. In Springbank, the cross wind was at ninety degrees to the runway in use, and the preferred runway was closed due to maintenance. The majority of the other airports we landed at had only a single runway so you have no options about the landing direction.
• if the Taxi driver cringes when you tell them the hotel/motel your going to, you might want to reconsider your selection of accomodation.