Cross Country Files & Maps

These charts are of our flying area here in Tennessee around Knoxville.  The resolution on these isn't good at all but at least you can get an idea of the humps and bumps in our flying area. We had to resize and compress them down from tif files several times.  These are pretty huge pictures, but we left them that way on purpose so that you can see the detail.

This little snippit it from Rotorway's Sport Helicopter quarterly newsletter.

It says we must have a signoff from a Helicopter CFI.  This was brought to RotorWays attention prior to my going out to Phoenix for my Phase III training.  According to RotorWay's John O'Neill and Bill Orth my cross country signoff is valid even though it was obtained from an airplane flight school here in Knoxville, Tennessee. I'll believe it when I have my ticket in my hand but until then I would just about bet you I'll have to repeat it again.

Flight Plan Form

This is the type of form RotorWay gave me to fill out when I was taking Phase II training. They are very hard to find. There are several types of forms used and this is one that is seldom used. As long as we are going from one airport to another this one works ok but if we plan any stops along the way we have to make as many forms as we have stops. If we don't do that we don't have a place to keep things like Com and ATIS information. Below you will find some down loadable versions of this form.

You can down load these and print them out for personal use

Version 1 Pdf file

Version 2 Pdf file

Version 3 Jpg 
Form like the picture above without my N number in it.

I started back into flight school in March, 2003.

The first time I went to do a cross country flight I found myself brand new once again lol. I had to spend close to an hour trying to figure out how to use my Electronic E6B again.  My solution was to write this list and retain it for the next time I find myself in this situation. The electronic E6B is pretty simple to use and the only trick to it is doing the calculating in the proper order.

Since it isn't something many of us do most of the time this list is a pretty handy thing to have around. Once you use it a time or two it all comes back to you.

Cross Country Planning Using Electronic E6B

If you want to down load this form in Microsoft Word click the link below

Cross_Country_Planning_Check List

Training at home

Here's some pics of the box we made for working with the Gps/Com unit at home.

This is a must have thing because it takes quite a bit of time to learn how the unit works.  It has a simulator mode that allows us to actually input true courses, airspeeds, winds and fuel burns into the unit and we're able to watch it just like we would if we were actually using the unit in flight.  About the only thing we can't simulate with it is using the com. We can input com channels but that's about it. Another thing we can do is input waypoints of places we plan on flying to in the future like friends houses, Homer's, Spurling's and the PRA Fly-Ins. The power adapter is kinda pricey, about 60 or 90 bucks I think, but you gotta have one if your going to play at home or work with it.  Having one from Garmin themselves made us feel better about it because of what we paid for the unit itself, we didn't want to take any chances of blowing it up lol. The box is just something we threw together one afternoon at our shop. It had a 3 inch 110 volt electric fan installed in the back of it to help cool the unit while we're playing with it.

Heres a link to a site that has the current Zulu time I got from John Pohlman.

It not only tells you the correct time but also shows you where it daylight and dark at in the world.

http://www.time.gov/timezone.cgi?UTC/s/0/java

Here's a neat chart I made up for converting time from Zulu time to current time across the USA.

I used this mainly for easily decoding times on Taff and Metar reports but it's also useful doing cross countries and flight planning for you lucky people that get to travel long distances.

END