In a previous article, "Nasir" said:
Having received my PPL recently and been on several cross countries, I was
wondering how extensive of a flight plan do people prepare before the trip?

I was flying IFR from Rochester NY to Goderich today. First thing I did,
a few days ago I plugged the route into AeroPlanner and did the auto route
thing. Duh, turns out it's a pretty damn simple route, I probably should
have just looked at the enroute chart. I plugged the route into CoPilot
in my Palm, and into my GPS, and hilighted it on both the US and Canadian
enroute charts.

This morning, checked the weather - it was going to be VFR the whole way,
but I decided to stick with IFR just to simplify the cross border
operation. Plugged the winds aloft into CoPilot, and also used it to
check the weight and balance (two people and 30 pounds of gear is NOT
enough to put the Lance anywhere near overweight, by the way). It was
going to be about a hour and a half flight. I figured it was going to
take half an hour to prepare the plane, and we needed 2 hours notice for
customs, so I called CANPASS, only to be told that Goderich wasn't an
airport of entry on the weekends - I guess I should have checked the AF/D
more carefully, since I thought on off hours you could still get customs
via call-out like you can at US airports of entry. Ok, no problem. Did a
CANPASS report for London. Filed IFR to London. Didn't bother to update
either the GPS, and just put London into CoPilot as a ground stop.

Had a little problem with the GPS not agreeing with the VOR and I followed
the VOR. Turns out that the radios in the planes are labelled wrong, so I
thought I'd tuned ROC for the outbound, but was following the OBS for the
radio tuned to GEE. Funnily enough, I thought I'd identified the VOR - I
guess I hadn't looked carefully enough at the audio panel when I'd pushed
the button and heard Rochester's ident.

Took off, flew the plan, and did it. The ETEs weren't going right - we
were getting tons more headwind than forecast, and we were going to be
half an hour late for customs. But hey, this is Canadian customs, not US,
so we weren't anticipating any problems. And we didn't get any.

We didn't go on to Goderich because of a little matter of the plane not
producing power on take off from London, requiring an emergency landing
back at London.

Oh well, that's flying for you.

--
Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
Diplomacy is the ability to let someone else have your way.