Western Nebraska Regional

Scottsbluff is “just across the border” into Nebraska and home to Scotts Bluff National Monument, a popular stop on the Oregon Trail and (shockingly) one of the most prominent points in the state.

I’ve been working lately on making more meticulous cross-country flight plans. In California, nearly everywhere worth going was <100 nm: the air museum at KMER, the wine country at 0Q9, the ocean at Monterey. The only flights I took longer than that were two of the last three before the pandemic, one 180nm one-way in a mountain checkout with an instructor (doesn’t count!), and one to KPRB (129nm).

By contrast, the closest place worth going here in Denver is 70nm, and the places really worth going again and again are >200nm. That means more meticulous fuel, weather, time, route, and emergency planning – top to bottom.

Now this is what the certificate is really for, and why each additional rating requires longer-distance flights: 50nm for private, 250nm for instrument, and 300nm for commercial.

There are two ways I’m practicing: first, I’m taking the meteorology 101 course Yale published online, and second, I’m working with instructors to brush up my skills. Let’s look at how this latest, longest PIC non-dual XC went and how I planned for it.

Here’s the plan:

1. Leave house at 7am
2. NE departure from KBJC
3. Climb 7500’
4. Follow I-25 N starting at VPNIC (North Interchange)
5. Climb 9500’ once clear B (provides 4000’ terrain clearance)
6. Turn right GLL at V220 (041 TO) (NIWOT)
7. Switch divert to KGXY
8. Turn left BFF at V207 (017 FROM / TO)
9. Switch divert to KIBM at 25nm outbound
10. Track GLL outbound until halfway (50nm); then BFF
11. Commit to KBFF at 25nm from BFF
12. Arrive @ 9:30am

Let’s see the handful of key goals this plan fulfills.

Key goals

I’m never more than 10min from a divert I can go-around from. And, better yet, I know at every moment what my best divert is and have it programmed and ready to go. If things go south, I won’t waste an extra couple minutes looking for airports, measuring distances on Foreflight, and looking up landing performance requirements.

Searching for diverts also identifies critical moments in the flight, where I’m about to get very far from a divert and should make some decisions first about weather, fuel, time, etc. before it gets hard to undo. And it gives me a reason to do the next thing …

I’m tracking VORs, which are often near airports. Yes, GPS is an amazing innovation and point-to-point navigation has enabled a much more efficient and inexpensive NAS, but it’s always good to have some backups. One item on my cruise checklist is to double-check my location with a second factor, which could be checking GPS with pilotage, or VOR with GPS, etc. And it’s good practice on how to use all the equipment in the airplane, in case of a real emergency.

Heading VOR-to-VOR also keeps me closer to diverts!

Beyond VORs, I also had pilotage points. Worst-case, assuming I lose all avionics and electrics and vacuums … and iPads … and my GPS watch – I can still fly north until I hit I-70, west until Cheyenne, and then either land there or follow I-25 south back to north interchange and then into KBJC. It would be hard to get super-lost!

I’ve cross-referenced aircraft performance against available diverts. First I search for all the airports anywhere near my route as potential diverts. By selecting the worst-case runway length, worst-case airplane weight, worst-case pressure altitude, and worst-case temperature for the day, I can get some … well, worst-case performance numbers. Then I don’t have to recompute the performance calculations in case of a divert, and I know which diverts give me the most and least margin so I can make an informed decision about where to go in what kind of emergency.

For example, I can easily tell that 82V is safe for landing anytime but only for takeoff if the day has cooled down a bit. I ended up taking it off my “official” diverts list but keeping it in mind for emergency-emergencies.

The checklists

I’ve upgraded my cruise checklist. Hilariously, it used to be just ENG INSTR, MIX LEAN, and ANNUN. Now it’s much more in-depth! Now it’s much bigger – although still just a minute or two worth of work every 20 minutes or so.

• Oil P & T
• Batt. & Alternator
• Fuel G. vs. Totalizer
• Fuel & Time
• Engine RPM
• Annunciators
• Divert UPDATE
• Blood O2 & CO
• Double-check Loc.
• Mixture LEAN

The SpO2 sensor is one of the valuable uses of a modern smartwatch. On a recent flight to KCOS at 10,500 ft cruise, it showed 92% compared to a cheap finger monitor that read 89%; I’m normally at 99%. Not bad! The CO detector is because carbon monoxide poisoning looks, to an SpO2 sensor, like oxygen bound to red blood cells – so it’ll show more and more highly-saturated blood as the CO poisoning sets in. That would be hypemic hypoxia, for the student pilots studying for their PPLs.

The Trip

Weather was entirely clear with ~10kt south winds all day. There were no clouds forecast until later afternoon altostratus over Cheyenne (dozens of miles west of the route) and still above our route (14k AGL). As the day went on, cirrus clouds grew to cover the sky, but that’s no concern at all.

We almost directly overflew KGXY, which felt sketchy until I (re-)did the math and confirmed it’s at 4700 feet – so the turbine TPA is 6300 – and we were a few thousand feet even higher than that.

It started to get cooold in the cabin up at 9500 feet, so the cabin heat came in handy. (Something I never had to use in CA – so now I own a CO monitor!) Let me tell you two things I learned: first, that thing is effective. And second, I’ll be wearing long socks in the plane from now on, because that vent blows directly onto my poor ankles until I feel like my skin is burning. No, thanks!

When we reached Scottsbluff, we hopped on the CTAF frequency to self-announce our maneuvers to the SW of the airport (over the national monument).¹

After weaving between departing traffic, including a medical helicopter going back and forth NW of the airport, we landed. After landing we had a little confusion about where to go, and I was reminded to plan for FBO location in my preflights and relearn the proper use of UNICOM (for example) but eventually I saw the sign and a wonderful man from the FBO came out to guide us in.

They were even kind enough to lend us their crew car, which was the fabulous Western Nebraska Regional Airport Courtesy Van, and no mistaking it. We loved the van. We drove it all over town to lunch and the National Monument, making our tourist status and love for Nebraska Regional Airport visible to all.

The part I’m possibly most proud of is our timing on the return journey. I wanted a sunset flight, and boy did I get one. The sun passing through the broken ceiling at the horizon was astonishingly beautiful. We landed 2 minutes before sunset so, again, safe and legal by a wide margin.

The only sketchy part was the return to KBJC. Approach dumped me off flight following (radar services terminated; squawk VFR) 20 miles north of KBJC with a comment that KBJC was busy and probably wouldn’t be able to let us in. Indeed, as soon as I switched to tower, I heard four airplanes call in from within 5 miles horizontally and 1000 feet vertically of me. I eventually did a 360 just to get away from whatever was happening.

Despite that, after coming back in, entering the airspace, and being fully controlled, I still had a little high-wing with no lights on whatsoever (yes – he was about two minutes from being illegal and had no margin for a go-around if he didn’t have lights at all, as I suspect) come straight at me apparently not seeing my intense strobes. The guy was obviously completely invisible in a dark, unlit airplane against a darkening sky.

Otherwise, I’d describe the flight as beautiful, uneventful, and perfectly-timed. I’d happily do it again just to enjoy the Western Nebraska Regional Airport courtesy van another time.

Let’s just see how many of these flight-planning “habits” remain years from now when I read all this again. I hope I haven’t become one of those DIR-ENT-ENT people!