Cross-Country (part 2) - what is a cross country?

I want to take a little time to talk about what a cross-country flight is and it's role in flight training of student pilots. While I am not a student pilot nor am I in flight training, I wanted the experience of taking a scenic ride in the form of a cross-country flight.

Students seeking their private pilot's certificate (single-engine) have to complete a variety of piloting tasks, both dual time with their instructor as well as solo time. Before flying solo as a student, the instructor endorses their pilot log book for the specific solo task. One of these tasks is to log a certain number of solo cross-country flights. It is way beyond the scope of this article to go into these definitions and requirements, but one of the articles that I am including in this series of articles about my cross-country flight will focus on where you can go for more information about flight training and aviation safety.

What I can say is that when I was ground school, the instructors discussed cross-country flights, saying that a cross-country flight is a flight of at least 50 nautical miles (NM) to another airport where you land at the airport and come to a full stop. We also spent some time in ground school talking about all that must be done by the student pilot before going on a cross-country flight. In addition to ground school time, students spend time with their individual instructors going over the their cross-country flight in some detail.

As I understand it, Cross-country flights come after a student pilot has learned take-offs and landings, climbing and descending, straight and level flight, radio communications, navigation skills, weather advisory services, flight planning, runway markings, temporary flight restrictions, and the hand signals that ground crew members use as you are preparing to park your plane. A student pilot's first cross-country flight will be with their instructor (dual time).

If I am remembering my ground school training correctly, with the possible exception of looking at the charts and planning a route, most of the pre-flight planning done by the pilot prior to a cross-country flight requires an idea of the weather forecast as well as checking for any flight restrictions that might be in place along the planned route. Most of the real pre-flight planning, including checking for new flight restrictions, happens either the night before or the day of the flight. For example, a current wind forecast is an important component of any pre-flight planning, and might be available 12 to 18 hours before take-off time. On a flight into the wind (aka a head wind), ground speed -- how fast the airplane is moving relative to the ground -- the flying time to the destination will be longer. Conversely, if the wind is at the tail of the aircraft (aka a tail wind), you will get to your destination a little quicker. Ground speed affects fuel consumption.&

Stay tuned for my next post in this series where I will be writing about what I did to the night before/morning of my cross-country scenic flight.

And speaking of my next post in this series, I am still in the process of developing an outline of the series of posts that I will be writing on my cross-country scenic ride. I'll try to post some sort of outline in a day or so. I know that I promised some more pictures, but they don't really fit into today's article. I will be posting one last set of pictures from this scenic ride in a later article, I promise.