Cross-country flying - SL Flight Training's style

The PPL flight training period goes on and now we've gotten into our first cross-country excercises. Solo flights have been flown in the traffic circuit and training area and every once in a while we have gone to the sky with the flight instructor to rehearse on some old things and learn new ones.

SL Flight Training's hangar, a few 152's in maintenance. On the right there's the Piper Turbo Arrow, which will become familiar to us in the end of the CPL training.

Cross-country flying using our schools professional methods and standard operating procedures have been the freshest and most new thing to me recently. I've flown a lot of cross-country on the ultralight side, and we of course did some operational flight plans and calculations but now the planning stage has risen to a whole new level. These flights are very thorough and everything needs to be prepared in advantage. We're training to become professionals after all, not recreational Cessna pilots.

After some basic navigation excercises I flew my first real cross-country flight. This flight was the so called "Hyvinkää-Lahti", which was a route from Malmi to Hyvinkää, from there to Lahti-Vesivehmaa and back to Malmi. The flight included touch and go landings on both of the aerodromes mentioned.

Nope, found no treasure over there this time.

Flight planning for "Hyvinkää-Lahti" took some 1.5 hours including fuel calculations, route plotting and making the operational flight plan. I did wind calculations, calculated ground speeds, magnetic headings and estimated fuel flow during the trip. Of course I had to gather all the radio frequences, aerodrome bulletins, route bulletins, aerodrome charts and information on touch and go landings. After that it was time to file the flight plans, order fueling and printing out all the notams, charts and weather information. Finally, when the pile of printed sheets exceeded the height of our Cessna's beacon, it was time to go and fly!

The flight itself went well and weather was decent enough for the whole trip. At the same time a few other planes flew the same route so had to keep my eyes open all the time. I must say that all the planning and preparing pays itself back when in the air, as everything feels so secure and organized. You know where you're going and what you're doing, have all the information at your hands and are always a bit ahead of your plane. Something I havn't always experienced in the past.