One of the most important tasks on any flight, but especially a long cross country, is fuel management. Over the years, I have worked out a system derived from what we called in the Navy the “Fuel Ladder”. The variant I use in the Long-EZ has little to do with the Navy version, but at least it allows me to track my fuel burn,

The Fuel Ladder is nothing more than a simple matrix showing the quantity of fuel in the left and right tanks at start, then each hour thereafter. I also circle the value for the tank who I select to transfer for that hour. This way, I always know how much I have burned in an hour, as well as the flight as a whole.

This means that I have to set up the routine of switching tanks after an hour, as well as recording the data. To facilitate remembering, I set the timer on my primary GPS to flash a warning after an hour. If I don’t remember to set the timer, however, I don’t get the reminder later.

Another part of the ritual housekeeping is that right after takeoff, I have to call Flight Service and have them open my Flight Plan. The purpose of a Flight plan when I am navigating by visual reference is solely so that people will know if I am overdue and where to conduct the search. Once the plan is open, you need to give periodic position reports, else the search team would have to cover your entire planned route – an impossible task if they are to fin you alive in time after a crash.

I try to make it a habit of calling every time as I enter a mountainous region, leave the region, cross an major navigational aid, or if an hour has elapsed.

I guess my point in all this is that after all the years of flying airshows, I had a rhythm developed that I followed consistently, but I never had to think about it. After so many years without doing this kind of traveling, though, it takes a lot of concentration, and I still make mistakes.

One of the toughest choices I have to make on every flight is about my routing. The fastest and most efficient routing is a straight line to my destination. Because of the curvature of the Earth, this path is actually called a Great Circle, but it is still flown as a straight line.

The drawback to this approach is that a Great Circle takes you over a predetermined path that doesn’t take into account weather or terrain. Since I want to die of old age, not smacking into a mountainside in bad weather or going down in a wilderness, I try to modify my routing to stay within gliding distance of roads or habitation, as well as avoiding very rough terrain.

I usually head out on cross-country flights IFR – I follow roads. I like having major roads within easy gliding distance so that if something goes wrong, I have a place to put down. I wish I had followed this concept a little more closely, but flying is often a trade off between perfect safety and actually getting to where you are going.

Today was an excellent example of the kinds of choices I make and then have to revisit as the flight progresses. I had planned to fly in an almost direct line from Pendleton, Oregon to Afton, Wyoming during the first leg of today’s trip. As I got to Pendleton, however, the clouds were closing in and I was realizing just how inhospitable the mountainous terrain ahead would be. As a result, I changed my routing to the south, towards Boise. I also had to call and coordinate with Flight Service, not because I needed permission (none is needed if you are flying visually), but because I wanted to let them know where to look if I failed to arrive at my destination.

The first leg into Afton, Wyoming was uneventful, with one of the more interesting things I saw from the air were the lava fields outside of Pocatello, Idaho. These stretch on for miles, and whenever I see them, they make me think of cake batter as it is poured into the pan, with the myriad of folds and swirls.

When I saw all the snow in the vicinity of Afton, I was concerned that perhaps there would be snow on the field, but it was warm and the field was dry and clear. It was clear right around the field, but it sure was cold.

Afton is isolated enough that it is impossible to talk to Flight Service until you have flown a ways from the field and climbed above about 8,000’. This gives you an idea for how isolated the field can be. At times, I saw that the nearest runway over 2,500’ in length was more than 30 miles away such as near a place called Big Piney.

The trip across the Rockies was uneventful, up to a point. I was at 13,500’, cruising along at about 170 knots ground speed, when I made a bad decision. By cutting across the most desolate portion of the Rockies, I would be able to save about 20 minutes off the flight, and since I was running late, I figured I would risk it. Of course, that was the time when the engine decided to scare the stuffing out of me.

I was cruising safely along when all of a sudden, the engine lost almost all power and started to run rough. I firewalled the throttle, switched tanks, checked the magnetos, and looked at all my instruments. I could tell that I had lost all power in cylinder #2, and it wasn’t coming back. I also checked my GPS and saw that the nearest airport was 20 miles away on the other side of a mountain, and there were no roads below me. It was as if someone was trying to remind me how stupid it is to blindly trust that machines will always keep working.

By pulling the throttle to idle and slowly advancing it, I was able to restore power. My guess is that the air into the engine had been disturbed, causing an imbalance where one cylinder went full rich, Cylinder # 2 was starved of fuel, causing the roughness and loss of power. This problem was easy to solve, but not so the racing of my heart. That took several hours to calm down.

It is worth pondering the effect of such fear on us. Now, I don’t relish it, nor do I seek it out, but in some ways it is almost cathartic. We go through our lives everyday with a certain amount of routine, and little or no excitement. When something like this crops up, although it scares us in the short term, later on, it makes you realize that you are in fact alive. Given the choice, I would rather do without it altogether, but since it happened, I must admit that it was nice to remember that there is more to life than commuting, meetings, and stress.

After this, the rest of the trip into La Junta, Colorado, which I chose just for its cheap (relatively) gas. There was nothing at the field, other than a fuel pump. Because I was in a hurry, my total time on the ground was less than 30 minutes.

While I was on the ground, however, I witnessed a close call. The plane behind me for landing was a twin Commanche, and as I exited the runway and looked back, the plane waiting to take off on the runway noticed that the Commanche had forgotten to put its gear down. Fortunately, the pilot at the hold short line made a call and the Commanche waved off their approach.

From La Junta, I made a beeline for Denton, Texas, where I was planning to see my cousin, Matt. As I worked my way towards Texas, I realized that I had made one more error: I thought the Dallas area was in the Mountain time zone. As you probably already know, they are in the Central time zone, so instead of arriving just after sunset, I got there a full hour after sunset, having to find the field in the dark.

Texas is certainly home to plenty of oil fields, but I was pleased to see one sign that it is doing something to move away from our dependence on oil: there was a very large windmill farm harnessing the incessant winds of the panhandle. Perhaps more such facilities in the future could help slow our ever-increasing dependence on oil (says the guy who is burning 8 gallons per hour of highly refined crude oil).

I had dinner with my cousin, Matt Montgomery and his wife, Mandy. He and I had not seen each other in about 4 years, since their wedding, so it was great to catch up with them. They had just gotten back from their first vacation overseas, and except for some overwhelming hassles with lost luggage, it seems like they had a great time in Sweden, Scotland, England and France.

Overall, it was a good day. I crossed most of the country, saw some impressive scenery, and managed to avoid any bad weather. The plane worked great (except for when the engine died in the heart of the Rockies), but I will take much of the blame as “pilot error” since I had leaned the mixture out pretty far.

Some statistics for the day:

Distance Covered: 1531 nm

Flight Time: 9 hours 27 minutes

Average groundspeed: 161.5 knots

Flight legs: 3

Highest Altitude reached: 13,800’

Highest Groundspeed attained: 181 knots

Food consumed: 8 20-oz bottles of Gatorade, 2 packets of cheese peanut butter crackers, 1 packet of Fig Newtons, one 5 oz packet of beef jerky

Other planes seen (outside of the terminal area): 2

In-flight entertainment: Listening to lessons about “Classical Music”, the Broadway soundtrack for Jesus Christ Superstar, Nanci Griffith’s “Flyer” and miscellaneous hits from the 70’s