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How to make long trips less boring?

Fuji_Abound wrote:

Why would you ever be bored?

I think I’ve only ever been bored once. Flying across the North Sea between Stavanger and Aberdeen. One and a half hours over water and the only thing that happened was a handover from Oslo to Scottish half-way.

Last Edited by Airborne_Again at 04 Nov 10:07
ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

“A couple of hours of this, with a 30kt headwind”
Would probably be hard work and not boring without a GPS and an autopilot.

Maoraigh
EGPE, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

A couple of hours of this, with a 30kt headwind

Get down to 1000 AGL and hand fly. Prob 90 less wind and things to see.

Except, that was France, full of military areas at low level which make VFR planning quite a job. ATC don’t clear you through it there (like they do with CAS, usually) so you have to plan it all yourself. I did this for 5 years and was glad to not have to do it anymore once I got the IR

Also the fuel burn per mile at 1000ft is perhaps 20% more than at FL100, so the gain from less wind is more than lost.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

He he… this vividly reminds me of a flight from Avignon to Geneva many moons ago in a Cessna 150 IFR.

Mont Blanc stayed in the window for ever in the same position… we had a 50 kt headwind, which reduced the forward speed to about 40 kts. Which in the end made this straightforward flight very much limit for this old 150…. we landed in Geneva with 10 mins to go to the night ban and after a very speditive radar vectoring by Geneva Approach.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

The scenary is less boring for 1h but I agree probably too much after 3h (by car you could have done it in 4h, but I guess you decided to go for mistral winds navigation charges instead of road tollgates)

Last Edited by Ibra at 07 Nov 00:32
Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

A couple of hours of this, with a 30kt headwind

At least you know you can land anywhere

LDZA LDVA, Croatia

Ibra wrote:

by car you could have done it in 4h, but I guess you decided to go for mistral winds navigation charges instead of road tollgates

Well, we were on the way home from a trip to Perpignan so we did not have much choice. At the time (way before internet was everywhere, they had a minitel at the airport if anyone remembers these) the meteorologist told us that there was Mistral low down but above FL50 it should be reasonable. Well, it turned out not to be, we tried at FL070 intially but could see the cars on the motorway overtaking us, so we eventually climbed up to 120 I think, where we made some forward speed. Thankful for the Pronav GPS on board anyway as we could see the progress and had some means of calculating an ETA otherwise we’d probably have given up latest near Grenoble.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Buckerfan wrote:

reads a book once he is in the cruise

Saint ExupĂ©ry would read and sometimes write while flying, and apparently circle his destination until he’d finished reading his chapter!

EGHO-LFQF-KCLW, United Kingdom

Set 7600 on the transponder and take a nap while the autopilot flies.:)
7500 if you want excitement ;-).

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