Flight across the continent! - part 2

Day 5 - We woke up and had a good breakfast, then I called Jay Honeck's
place. Mary answered and said come on over!

Moline to Iowa City - We made the short hop to Iowa City. I talked with
Jay on the phone, and we were given the keys to the Alexis Park van to
drive over to the hotel! Such trust from somebody who had never met us!
We can't say enough about Jay and Mary!

Jay showed us around the hotel and helped us with weather planning. It
looks like they've done a great job at improving the hotel, and many more
things are coming! Jay - thanks so much for the hospitality, we're sorry
we couldn't spend more time.

Iowa City to North Platte, NE - We made a pretty uneventful trip --
except that the headwinds began to get pretty bad. Our Cherokee flies
about 105kts; on the way east we saw 115-125 kts. Well on this leg we
were seeing more like 85kts - ouch!

We spent the night in North Platte. Although our plans had been to cross
the Rockies via Interstate 80 (Cheyenne-Laramie-Rawlins), the forecast
winds the next day were for up to 33kt ground winds. We didn't want to
cross the high terrain with the likely turbulence. Plus the headwinds
were so high that we'd have to land and refuel at a high airport, which
meant density altitude issues. So we chose to take the longer route
south.

Day 6 - North Platte to Tucumcari. This was a long flight with high
headwinds. Although the ground winds were not overly high, the winds
aloft over the entire western US were quite high. There was really
nowhere to go to avoid them. We resigned ourselves to slow trip and
planned for an extra fuel stop. After takeoff at North Platte, we
actually saw (briefly) a ground speed on the GPS of 31kts!! As we climbed
to 10,500 the speed improved to about 85kts - poor, but much better than
lower.

Tucumcari to Winslow - It was almost 100degrees here and the density
altitude was about 8100 feet. You need to be careful with performance in
these situations, especially in an underpowered airplane like ours.
Luckily the runway is over 7000 feet, so we knew we were ok for takeoff
distance. We took off and slowly climbed to 10,500.

The flight over the Rockies was slow, bumpy, and tiring. We landed in
Winslow about 4pm. The surface winds were 22 gusting to 30, but straight
down the runway. It was over 90 degrees when we landed, and the Winslow
density altitude was 8200 feet. We decided to take our time to let the
air cool a bit.

Winslow's FBO is interesting. On the one hand, they have a nice room with
some sleeping cats, air conditioning, and chairs. On the other hand,
cleanliness is obviously NOT a priority here. Bathrooms, dirt, pet hair -
it's not an executive jet FBO! We ate in a very good Mexican restaurant
next door. Tankers were taking off to fight a fire near Flagstaff, and it
was great to watch these twin turbine aircraft (P2s?) lumber into the air
with their load of retardant.

Winslow to Bullhead city - We could have made it home nontstop if we
didn't have headwinds, but we were grinding along at 80-90 kts most of
the way. We landed in Bullhead city just as it was getting near fully
dark. On final approach my partner said "now watch the lights go out just
as you're landing!". Just as I was flaring the lights did exactly that!
There was just enough light to see the runway, so I continued the flare.
The problem was that I couldn't judge the last few feet of height
accurately, so I had to add power and "feel" for the runway. Still, I
made a decent landing. Later we found out that the pilot-controlled
lights were on a different frequency than the one in our Jeppeson charts.

We refueled and made our final flight home to Camarillo in the dark. This
is weird when you're flying over mountains and it is pitch black. But we
had the interstate under us most of the way, so we knew where we would go
if we had had any problems.

Conclusions:

- It's great to fly cross country. You learn a lot and gain confidence.
- A Cherokee 140 is not a great plane for this.
- It's wonderful that we have the freedom to experience something like
this
- Gas ranged from $3.67/gal to almost $5.00/gal
- Jay has a really nice hotel. He's as nice a guy as you would think from
his posts!

Tim Long