Do you fly xcountry or local?

[chrisk]

By the FAR definition of 50nm, 90+% of my flights are cross country.  By my definition (day trip in a car possible), 60% would be local flights.

[AlanA]

Cross County! I commute twice a month from Utah to California.  A 3 hour plane trip verses a 9 hour car trip!   3 to 4 hour trips are PERFECT for a Mooney.  I keep a car in both places in case weather is a problem.  Then a few local trips in between commutes to practice skills or take friends.

[Seth]

I'd say a mix of both.  I love flying just to go fly.  However, I have also taken a lot of trips.  I think close to 700 of my 920 hours are logged as cross country, but again, those can include a burger run or lunch meet up.  I have used my Mooney for transportation for work many times, as well as going to see clients, or take clinets up for a spin.  I'd say easily 60-70% cross country and 30-40% local.

 

-Seth

[midlifeflyer]

I guess one question is how are we defining cross country? Even the FAA has more than one definition. Are we talking ">50 NM" or just "to another airport"? 

 

I'm a member of a flying club with multiple makes/models. For shorter trips - unless they have a primarily Mooney proficiency purpose (many right now as I'm pretty low-time Mooney-wise) - I'll grab a fixed gear. Longer flights, it's definitely the Mooney unless there's some operational advantage to one of the others (for example by the book, a Warrior has better mountain takeoff performance than a later model J). I've always found it nice to be able to pick the airplane based on the mission.

 

Overall, though, most of my flights are cross country (using the FAA's "to another airport" definition.

[phecksel]

Is it just me or are others getting some strange re-routes lately? I had one last week flying just west of DC airspace that ended up being six waypoints in probably 150 miles - turns to the right, turns to the left, into DC airspace , then back out of their airspace. After two requests with the next controller, I finally got a direct route approved. Made no sense...

Ok, it's been awhile since I flew, much less in the system.  Detroit routing made ZERO sense, until I got a TRACON tour.  I'm looking at a chart on a table and discovered three things, The VOR location for the center of the CBA was off by almost a mile, another waypoint fix was off by a couple of miles, but the most important thing, was the "fence" around Detroit.  It was like a huge lightbulb went off in my head and I had to ask why they didn't share that with the GA community.  About six months later they started handing out a nicely laid out graphic to the community.  All traffic came in and out of Detroit Approach Control through gates in the fence.  IRC, it was 4 GA in/out gates, and 4 big iron.  Not all gates would be used on a given day.

 

For the OP, for years, my drive to the airport was almost an hour... so i just got in the habit of long cross country flights.  Even when I finally moved the plane close to my house, IRC, even the $100 hamburger was technically XC.

[FoxMike]

Mostly cross country because I like to travel.  Have logged about 4850 total of which 4000 is cross country.  Last big trip was from Denver to Dayton to Martha's Vineyard to Bar Harbor to Maniac Island and back to Denver.  A couple of years ago a group of us flew around the Caribbean Basin.  Stopped in Bahamas, DR, San Marten, Guadeloupe, Granada, Curacao, Panama, Guatemala and Mexico.  Lots of fun and lots of water.  

[RocketAviator]

Except for currency and I get most of that XC in real IMC but could not think of my ol bucket of bolts as a local bird!!! 

Rocket On!

[Martin H]

Regarding times?    Mostly - Cross Country - 2 trips a month from Ft. Polk, LA to South Atlanta, GA.

 

Landings?   Mostly local - taking people up for flights over their homes, work, or just for first flights.   And to clear my head.

 

   How is everyone doing tonight?

[quik flite]

I always considered my breakfast run local,  about 80  to 100 miles one way but  maybe I am more of a cross country flyer.  The Mooney is a very nice flying Airplane  , lots of fun .

[rbridges]

the mooney has been great since my daughter started going to college.  her dorm is right at an hour of flight time in the mooney,  I don't do a lot of tooling around anymore except for IFR currency.  

[DaV8or]

Technically, the vast majority of all my flight time is XC according to the FAA. I used to always insist on going somewhere and then landing. In the last year or so, I have become pretty much a local flyer though, so that's what I put in the poll above. However, many of my flights will be 200nm and over, but since I end up landing at the same airport I took off from, it's not technically XC.

 

The other day I took off, climbed up and flew the entire San Francisco Bay Area above the class Bravo airspace, looking down, monitoring but not talking to anyone, squawking 1200 just because I never have done that and just because I could. Again, landed back at my home 'drome, so no XC. That's why I'd never tade it for a Cub, or something slow. I can see a lot more terrain and check out more stuff in the same amount of time.

 

I'm thinking about combining my love of photography and my love of country flying for fun. I just wish I could figure out how to program my autopilot to do turns around a point. That would be sweet! Maybe Nikon, or Canon should hook up with S-Tec and create a photographer's edition!

[rbridges]

 

 

 

 

I'm thinking about combining my love of photography and my love of country flying for fun. I just wish I could figure out how to program my autopilot to do turns around a point. That would be sweet! Maybe Nikon, or Canon should hook up with S-Tec and create a photographer's edition!

 

OMG, how much would a certified, FAA approved camera cost?  Would it need an anunciator somewhere on the panel?

[Hank]

OMG, how much would a certified, FAA approved camera cost?  Would it need an anunciator somewhere on the panel?

Never happen--lifecycles at Canon, Nikon and other electronic companies is half of the certification time or less . .

[jlunseth]

How far do you need to go to call it cross country?

What constitutes a cross country flight under the FAR's depends on what you want to count the time for.  61.1( defines it several ways.  The basic definition is that any flight by a certificated pilot taking off from airport A and landing at airport B, that requires the use of dead reckoning or a nav system, is a cross country flight regardless of distance.  However, if you want to count the time towards a private pilot, commercial, or instrument, the flight has to be a straight line distance of more than 50 nautical miles.  So you can log a ten mile flight from point A to point B as a cross country, but if you do that, and you need to produce your logged cross country time for one of the listed certificates, you are going to have to pick through the log and find only those flights where there was a straight line distance between two landing points of more than 50 nm.  The ultimate destination airport does not need to be 50 nm away, by the way, so long as one of the airports at which you land on the route of flight is the required 50 nm.

 

It is simpler to just log only those flights that have the required 50 nm distance, at least until you have your commercial and instrument and no longer are going to need to sort through for 50 miles flights.

 

The interesting footnote to this that occurred to me, is that the required cross country hours for an ATP apparently can include short hops less than 50 nm.

[jlunseth]

How far do you need to go to call it cross country?

What constitutes a cross country flight under the FAR's depends on what you want to count the time for.  61.1 b defines it several ways.  The basic definition is that any flight by a certificated pilot taking off from airport A and landing at airport B, that requires the use of dead reckoning or a nav system, is a cross country flight regardless of distance.  However, if you want to count the time towards a private pilot, commercial, or instrument, the flight has to be a straight line distance of more than 50 nautical miles.  So you can log a ten mile flight from point A to point B as a cross country, but if you do that, and you need to produce your logged cross country time for one of the listed certificates, you are going to have to pick through the log and find only those flights where there was a straight line distance between two landing points of more than 50 nm.  The ultimate destination airport does not need to be 50 nm away, by the way, so long as one of the airports at which you land on the route of flight is the required 50 nm.

 

It is simpler to just log only those flights that have the required 50 nm distance, at least until you have your commercial and instrument and no longer are going to need to sort through for 50 miles flights.