Cross Country Flying Mission – Learn To Fly Better and how to WIN ForeFlight Prizes
Pilots need a mission. I'm Jason Miller, a full-time professional
flight instructor. On the Finer Points channel you can join me
as I bring you tips and tricks that I've learned from 20 years on the flight line. Hello aviators, I'm here at Palo Alto airport
this evening, getting ready to fly a mission. I'm going to bring you guys along and I'm
going to show you a few tips about cross-country flying. But I also want to show you this very very
cool thing that ForeFlight's doing where they actually have adventures that you can go fly. You can download this trip kit to your ForeFlight
– this adventure planning kit and you can go out and retrieve ForeFlight swag at various
destinations, check out those local destinations, and win prizes in the process. When I was a kid, you guys hear me talk a
lot about riding horses, and when I was a kid we used to do this thing called the "hunter
pacer". Has anyone ever heard of a hunter pacer? Anyone? Anyway, look it up. It was one of the coolest things where you
get on your horse and you ride all over town, ride through the forest and collect sort of
flags to let everybody know that you actually made it to each destination, and this is a
little bit like that for pilots.
One truth is, pilots love an adventure, we
love to fly a mission, and I hear from so many pilots that they go through all this
effort to get their pilot certificate and then they don't really know what to do with
it. You know they take friends up on bay tours,
they grab a $100 hamburger, they don't know what to do. So I'm really proud of ForeFlight for coming
up with this thing that they've come up with. If you just go to foreflight.com/fly-out,
URL below, you'll see what they're up to, and tonight we're going to fly up to Santa
Rosa airport through complicated bay area airspace on a mission to go collect some ForeFlight
swag. Let's do it. Check this out it's really easy to do you
just go to the website I just mentioned, you scroll down until you see the content package,
you download that and once you have it on your iPad you then share it to the ForeFlight
app and boom, you can go in and see all the different PDFs for the different destinations
that are possible in that region.
And you can see that it's not just, you know,
basic information about the area and the runway, but it's also cool stuff to do when you get
there. So this is really fun, this is just like a
little game that pilots can play, and in the process maybe go win something, so we're gonna
fly up to Santa Rosa this evening, let's go ahead and get a weather briefing, file a flight
plan and hit the air. Make sure you file this flight plan because
filing the plan makes it super easy for ForeFlight to follow along with your journey, and you'll
be automatically entered to possibly win prizes. Palo Alto tower Skyhawk 784SP ready to take
off from runway three one. 784SP Palo Alto tower right forty five is
aproved, runway three one cleared for take-off wind three two zero at one three and were
you looking just to fly through Oakland to Santa Rosa? Yeah, that's affirmative, just over Oakland
airport and then pretty much direct Santa Rosa All right you guys one thing to remember is
to get your time off, right, so a lot of us use the lights-camera-action sort of mnemonic
to sort of remember everything there is to do Lights are where we want them, camera is set
the way we want it, action is mixture rich you should add lights-camera-action-time-off
and start practicing that now, because if you forget to record that time on a check
ride you won't know, you'll be all messed up, you won't know what your time was from
liftoff to your first checkpoint, and if you don't practice it that way you won't do it,
and then in the real world it's just a great aeronautical habit – good airmanship …
to know what time you take off. Power set. Engine guages look good, airspeed alive, we
have our abort speed, there's rotation, no runway All right you guys, another cross-country
tip that I'm going to give you here are your checkpoints Here we are, I'm making landfall by the mouth
of the Petaluma river over to my right, I've got Napa over to my left, I've got these lakes
and these mountains, so remember everything is a hypothesis until you prove it's true. We have the scientific method in flying and
for that reason when you pick checkpoints don't pick the third tower on the high tension
lines below us. Circle a big area, see what you can see on
the VFR chart, not just the one little thing that you're right over, but I should have
the town of Novato off to my left, I should have a raceway off to my right, so pick multiple
things, prove to yourself that you are in fact where you think you are.
The last cross-country tip I'm going to give
you is to have some sort of arrival briefing, this is something that I teach instrument
students and have just started adopting it for VFR as well, because it's equally appropriate,
but I use the five A's. So the first thing we're going to do is get
the ATIS at Santa Rosa, let's do that. Santa Rosa tower, information Charlie zero
one five three Zulu observation altimeter 2999 All right we've got information Charlie and
it shows we're landing runway 14, so the first A is get the ATIS, the second A is write down
the altimeter setting, the third A is going to be brief the arrival or the approach, so
we're going to go ahead and look at Santa Rosa, we're going to look at the airport diagram,
make sure that we understand, so 14 is going to be a left downwind entry, so we can expect
that when we contact Santa Rosa, they'll tell us to enter left downwind runway 14.
All right you guys, so the next A is avionics,
let's make sure we have Santa Rosa tower in the radio, Santa Rosa's on one one eight five,
We'll go ahead and get the ground frequency as well, why not right? One two one nine, we can put that in the backup,
because we're not talking to anybody else, just get ahead that way, so avionics and the
last one is Airplane which is like a GUMPS check, we're not quite ready for that yet
but that would be the last A. Santa Rosa tower, Skyhawk 784SP approximately seven miles southeast
with Charlie, landing. Skyhawk 784SP Santa Rosa tower, make left
traffic runway 14 report midfield. Left traffic 14 report midfield 784SP. And 784SP is midfield left downwind, runway 14. Skyhawk 4SP number two, follow Cirrus in a
one-mile final, runway 14 clear to land. Number two, looking for traffic, clear to
land 14 784SP. All right guys the last A, do it twice before
you get there, you read the written checklist when you're 10 miles out, it's the only time
you do the checklist before the flow check but then in the pattern …
784SP clear to
land runway 14. Clear to land 14 784SP. All right then you say carb heat, if there
is any, there is none, gas is on both, undercarriage down, welded, I see a wheel, mixture's full
rich, power, props, pumps wherever you need it, seatbelt, security, switches. That's your GUMPS check. Final approach path is clear. You should really do GUMPS twice in the pattern,
so you know that was once on the base leg, let's run it one more time, carb heat, gas,
undercarriage, mixture, power, props, pump, seatbelt, security, switches. So the way that last A works is, when you're
VFR, it's the only time you're going to read a list before you do the acronym or the mnemonic,
or the flow check, but then you know, so read the list 10 miles out, I don't want you reading
paper anywhere near an airport, and then once you've read it then it's just a GUMPS check
at least two times in the pattern.
That was a little tight right there where
I did it on base and then final, so maybe downwind or on the 45 and then again on final
just before you land, all right. If you do that you can defy that silly old
aviation legend that there are two kinds of pilots: those that have had gear-up landings
and those that will. Ha, not you my friends, because you watch
this channel. Look at this, beautiful evening here in Santa
Rosa as we approach runway 14. That was a super fun flight up here and we
have a reason to be here – it's a little cross-windy, I'm gonna do a crosswind landing
here – but we have absolutely a good reason to be here at Santa Rosa this evening, we
are on a mission from ForeFlight, so let's taxi over to Kaiser Air and pick up some swag.
Alright you guys, we made it here to Santa
Rosa. Wow, look at that. This is perfect because I forgot my mask,
so this is perfect I can just do this, then they won't look at me funny here. Boom, there it is, look at all that fun stuff. OK you guys, that is the end of our epic adventure. Hopefully you picked up a few tips that you
can apply to your cross-country flying. And remember that if you just file a flight
plan ForeFlight knows exactly where you're going on these adventures, so that's easy
for them to keep track of that, plus it's the safest way to fly, and they make it so
darn easy, so go ahead and do that. Huge thanks for flying along with me today
and to the sponsors for their support of this show. Remember that there is tons of bonus content
up on Patreon if you haven't seen that, it's coming all the time, also there's a free gift
video at learnthefinerpoints.com.
Hit the like button, subscribe to the channel
leave a comment below, share far and wide with your friends, but most importantly, until
next time, be safe and fly your best..
