Maybe it’s the Georgia flying weather, or maybe it’s the ever-increasing emphasis on “old” pilot instead of “bold” pilot, but it seems that flight planning these days is a lot more about if and when than about route and altitude.
This present trip was supposed to have been to spend Thanksgiving with my sister and her family in Knoxville, Tennessee, but weather and the nation’s newest pastime, upper respiratory infections, squashed it. The trip was postponed to Super Bowl weekend in February.
For this excursion, the direct route from Savannah, Georgia, to Knoxville is over the Great Smoky Mountains. It’s only two hours by RV-9A, but there are gotchas lurking in the flight planning. For instance…
When I was at Gulfstream, one of my test pilot buddies shared that his en route minimums for single-engine flying are 1,000 feet. That means that if the engine goes pfft in the clouds, you’ve still got a screaming chance of finding something soft to run into when you break out. This rational and reasonable concept took a while to break through my steely-eyed self-image of being more capable than that, but it’s now firmly in my mental ops book. Even so, there’s lots of countryside in the Southeast where it’s all forest, devoid of landing sites.
It was now time to plan the trip. The route is simple, GPS direct, but…there’s my personal 1,000-foot en route…
Source www.planeandpilotmag.com
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