Planning a cross-country

A complete VFR flight planned start to finish on the sectional.

16 min read · Navigation

After this lesson you can

  • Follow the full cross-country planning sequence, from weather check to filed flight plan.
  • Reproduce the book's own worked example, Chickasha to Guthrie, end to end.
  • Plan a real short VFR leg on a New York sectional excerpt, including a conflict with controlled airspace.
  • Choose a cruising altitude that satisfies the hemispheric rule and clears any airspace in the way.

Every earlier lesson in this module is a tool. This lesson is the job those tools were built for: taking a real chart, a real pair of airports, and turning them into a flight that can actually be flown - a course, an altitude, a fuel total, and a flight plan filed with an FSS.

The method is worked twice: once exactly as the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge presents it, with its own real numbers, and once live, on a New York sectional excerpt, planning a short leg between two real airports with a real controlled-airspace conflict to resolve.

The rest of this lesson

  1. 1.The method, in order
  2. 2.The book's own example: filing Chickasha to Guthrie
  3. 3.Now plan one yourself: Republic to Brookhaven
  4. 4.Measuring the course and spotting the conflict
  5. 5.From true course to compass heading, and an altitude that clears the shelf
  6. 6.Distance, time, and fuel for the leg
  7. 7.Filing it and flying it
  8. 8.Routing through the airspace, and choosing the radios you will need
  9. 9.The electronic flight bag in planning, and what stays with the pilot
  10. 10.Estimated time of arrival, in Coordinated Universal Time
  11. 11.Interception: if a military aircraft appears on your wing

These 11 sections, their figures, the checks along the way and the end-of-lesson quiz come with the PPL track. Paid once, yours for good.

See what the PPL track costsEvery module 1 is free to read, no account, no card.

Key terms

Try to recall each definition before turning the card.