Manhattan to Danville

Click here for the route.

Another interesting day of flying. Today's plan was to do our longest flight yet, 3.2 hours. That would take us from lovely Manhattan to Danville, where Sharon's friend Barb lives.

The flight started out nice, with clear skies and very favorable winds. How favorable? Until now our average ground speed has been between 115 and 125 knots. The winds at 5500 ft were pushing us along at around 30 kts, giving us ground speeds in the vicinity of 155 kts. Here's what the GPS looks like, when you are going really fast (for a 172, at least):


But good things never last. Once we got past Kansas City bad clouds appeared around 4000 feet. Bad clouds like to travel in groups and cover the sky where they are, which means we had a choice to go above them or under them. Above would mean that we would have to hope to find a hole in the cloud cover to come down through near the destination; below would mean flying at only 3000 feet, with lots of turbulence. Since the cloud cover was supposed to be there all the way to our destination, we chose to go under and endure the turbulence. Bad clouds, by the way, look like this:


This was the first time in this trip that an instrument flight rating would have been useful. With it we would have been able to come down through the clouds at our destination and enjoyed a much smoother ride most of the way. Instead we bumped our way through Kansas, Missouri and Illinois, hand flying the plane because the autopilot was getting very confused. Lots of work, but we were ok.

One thing I expected for this leg was to fly over town after town with the big central water tower with the town name. They might have been there, but we were bouncing around too much for me to have the time to leisurely look for them. One town, though, was nice and decided to make sure I did not miss their water tower. This is how a town makes sure you don't miss their water tower:


The cool part of the trip is we got to fly over two major U.S. rivers: the Missouri and the Mississippi. This is what the part of the Missouri we saw looked like:



And this is what the Mississippi looked like:


Another interesting thing about this flight was how flight following was handled. Since we were flying so low, we were frequently getting out of radar range and the air traffic controller would cancel the flight following service, give us another frequency and tell us to try talking to them in 10 miles or so. This happened 3 times. Only when we got past St. Louis were we able to get flight following all of the way.

Landing at Danville was challenging, due to the stiff crosswind (16 kts, 60 degrees from the runway heading). We found another Cessna trying to land at this airport and used him as a "piranha bull." It landed successfully, we attempted our landing and were able to get down in one piece.

Sharon's friend Barb picked us up and took us out for lunch and ice cream. Here's what Barb, Bill and Sharon waiting in line for ice cream look like:


And that was it for this leg. Right now we don't know if the weather will allow us to make it to Waynesburg (our final destination) tomorrow. We'll have a better idea tomorrow morning.