I’ve only done it twice, so I imagine that I will make alterations to this guide after we have done it as a family. Both times I was with people with a high tolerance for discomfort, which helps with this sort of adventurous travel. Keeping that in mind, here were the simple tenets that helped us across, once to the East and one back home to the West. Click to continue »

I’ve been a good customer of many businesses across the country, a lot of them situated on airfields. I use a website called AirNav to look up airfields before I land there. It will tell me if the food is edible, the fuel is cheap, and the people friendly.

FBO (I’ve started a glossary!) stands for Fixed Base Operator. So, unlike a charter operator, which could just own a plane and land places to grab passengers, an FBO has at least one location that is fixed to a particular airfield. They vary wildly in the services they provide. I like both ends of the spectrum. Sometimes I am the little guy visiting the huge, jet-ready FBO, and I get all the luxury that the private-jet crowd is used to even thought I am in a little bug-smasher. Other FBOs are geared toward the learning-to-fly crowd (and, indeed, offer instruction and rental planes) and it can feel like you’ve stepped back into the 1950s when you walk in (the flight training business is not very lucrative). I like walking into those, since it feels like so many pilots have stood on the same worn carpets talking about flying. Adam and I learned at a small flight school, so they also feel familiar all the way back to my student pilot days. Click to continue »

First Wave

Traveling across the continent in the plane for the first time was not something I took lightly. I read a lot, studied the charts a lot, and talked to a lot of other pilots. After much consultation, this is what I packed into the plane (before we then loaded it with our luggage). As usual, click on a thumbnail to see the full-sized photo.
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