Figuring Out the Route

Once we had our noble steed, the next step was to figure out how to make our way to Waynesburg. We decide on some criteria early on:

• Legs should be about 3 hours long. With full tanks the faithful steed could do 4.5 hours with reserves, but we decided our butts did not have that kind of endurance.
• Limit ourselves to airports at 4500' or below. 180 HP is plenty, but hot days on high altitude airports might make it "just enough."
  
• Be done with flying by early afternoon. During the summer, high winds and thunderstorms happen mostly in the afternoon and by flying early we should avoid the worst weather. This means at most two legs a day and waking up way earlier than people would normally expect me to.
  
• Stay close to roads; no flying over large unpopulated expanses (a.k.a deserts)
  

There are two stops we want to make along the way: Manhattan, KS, to visit Sharon's niece, and Danville, IL, to visit Barb.

Once we had those parameters we made our way to the airport shop and bought a huge map of the US and cut a piece of yarn equivalent to roughly three hours of flying. We decided on a southern route to avoid the higher peaks of the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains, and ended up deciding on stops in California, Arizona, Texas, Kansas, Illinois and finally Pennsylvania.

With that in mind we moved to WACs (wide area charts) to figure out our actual route. ONe more trip to the airport shop, 6 charts and a bigger piece of yarn this time, and with the help of AOPA's Airport Guide, we got our stops: Palm Springs, Tucson, El Paso, Amarillo, Manhattan, Danville and Waynesburg.

We then moved on to AOPA's flight planner to figure out our actual routes. Two evenings trying different combinations and we had a plan. As a last check we showed the proposed route to our instructor and a couple of friends who have flown this route before. They warned us about thunderstorms in the afternoon, but agreed with the general plan.

So one more trip to the airport shop, this time to buy the 10 sectionals, which are the charts we will actually use for navigation. And now, 4 weeks, several emails, three visits to friends and 17 maps we are finally ready for the trip.