• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • Contact

Golf Hotel Whiskey

Golf Hotel Whiskey: for pilots and aviation enthusiasts

Tips to prepare for your first cross country solo

If you are a student pilot, you will eventually need to do a “cross country” solo away from the familiar surroundings of your home airport. This first solo into unfamiliar territory can be intimidating at first but it will also prove to be a major confidence booster.  

Hence, a recent post by Jason Schappert containing a couple of tips for your first cross country solo is well worth reading. Jason’s main point is that you should start with a great plan. In other words, you need to:

– Pick checkpoints you know you can find or have found in the past.
– Start planning early, use the night before to knockout non-weather related items and do the weather stuff the day of the flight.
– Work on your organization, where will you put everything in the cockpit? Remember you have an extra seat.

In addition, Jason has also created a short aviation radio segment where he talked to a reader who was about to do his first solo. In the half-hour segment, Jason gives plenty of additional tips for students who are preparing for their very first solo and hence, the segment is well worth listening to.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Julien says

    May 20, 2010 at 08:48

    Preparation, preparation, preparation… Create a mud map of the flight, visualise the flight at home beforehand either by following the track on the map or flying it in a flight simulator or even in Google Earth. Make sure you have the main events of the flight in your head (checkpoints, area frequency boundaries, CTAF boundaries, etc.) and above all remember to aviate, navigate and communicate. In that order.

    My first cross-crountry flight was one of my most memorable aeronautical experiences, I rank it at the same level as my first solo, I got such a fantastic feeling of achievement from finding the destination airport right where I expected it right when I expected it… and all that without a GPS. Magical!
    .-= Julien

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Matthew Stibbe
Matthew Stibbe is CEO of Articulate Marketing and Turbine, the easy, online way to deal with office paperwork. He has an FAA CPL/IR and an EASA PPL/IR and sometimes flies a Cirrus SR-22. He also writes about wine at Vincarta and being a better manager at Geek Boss.
Bureaucracy must die eBook
Subscribe via RSS

Recent Posts

  • IATA Airport Abbreviations
  • Upcoming Concorde and Apollo documentaries
  • Lie Back And Think Of England: London To Austin On BA’s New 787 Dreamliner
  • Video: Parachuting from the edge of space
  • Hilarious preflight safety video for GA aircraft
  • San Francisco Airport at night – beautiful time lapse video
  • A practical jetpack (finally) takes off
  • A man in a hot air balloon realises he is lost
  • Pegasus House: The former HQ of the Bristol Aeroplane Company is restored
  • Vintage British aviation posters from the 1920-1930s

Copyright © 2023 Golf Hotel Whiskey. All rights reserved.