America is Huge... My Fourteen-Hour, 3-Leg, Flight to California

I could make the story of how I traveled to the State of California and spent exactly 12 hours there into a fairly lengthy saga. However, I'm in Jacksonville, FL on my Field Carrier Landing Practice Det, getting my practice landings in with my class before we all go to the boat to get our Quals in December and I'm going to hit the hay pretty soon, so I'll try to keep it short.

We briefed late, at noon, later than I'd hoped to. This meant we couldn't take off until 2pm. However, I checked my calculations and everything seemed to be okay. The problem was the weather. Well, there was a huge line of storms from Louisiana to Chicago and I wasn't sure what my instructor wanted to do, so I pressed with preparations for the original plan when he came up to me at about 11:30 and told me that we were going to stop in NOLA vice Memphis.

Well, I did what I could to re-do the calculations and prep for the new route. We briefed on time, but the weather report was late so we didn't get off the ground until 2:30. Enroute our headwinds clocked in at around 40kts. Arriving at NOLA, we could see the southernmost cells of this huge storm system that cut the country in half, but we did my practice approach procedures and touched down sometime around 5pm.

We fueled, looked at our planning and after re-negotiating our flight plane with Air Traffic Control (because the system dropped our filed route), we got in the air around 6 for a 9:15pm touchdown in Albequerque. Well, we were late thanks to all of the above and 60-knot headwinds on this leg so the Air Force Base Ops was closed and we had to fuel up at a civilian operator on the airfield. The problem with that was that they didn't have access to the starting power and air carts that we needed.

After a lengthy discussion and process, during which my instructor seemed like he was about to kill me, our back-seater started looking for hotel rooms and much to my relief, my Air Force friend brought us a bag full of tasty burritos, the very cool civilian lineman dude brought over a start cart from the FedEx terminal. This piece of equipment, which must be normally used for jumbo-jets was about as big as my subaru forester and started our plane up in seconds flat.

During the next leg, we saw 90kts of headwind as we plodded over the New Mexico and Arizona desert at a mind-numbingly slow ground speed of about 160kts (your passenger jet usually zips around at 4-500kts, give or take). Finally we arrived in familiar territory. I started to recognize the approach controls and navigational aids of Southern California. I saw the lights of Los Angelos out to my left. After hours of quiet and red-cockpit light boredom, we were almost there. It was just after 1 am and I had flown a plane across the entire country.

They switched us to a different controller and we lost touch with them for a few seconds, during which I needed to descend. We re-established comms, I got my descent and ended up right there on the instrument approach. Well I didn't brief the pilot-controlled lighting as I should have, so as I finished the approach, I realized the field was not lit. I went around as my instructor expressed his, well he was pissed. He had me circle the field while we figured out what to do. After about a half hour or so of burning fuel during which, well I should probably just skip to the end... haha.

We finally got the lights on (tower didn't enable the 'pilot-controlled lighting' when they left for the night) and I landed the plane in California. It was beautiful seeing the pacific ocean lit up by moonlight all in front of me while I was circling and making my approach. It was a hell of a trip and we didn't get to bed until 3am, but I felt like I just conquered the journey across the continent. I thought of the untold thousands of settlers, explorers and the like who died spending weeks doing what I just did in half a day. I thought of how much of a pain it was fighting the winds, my own exhaustion and all the ridiculous challenges that we'd faced that day.

I learned a lot though.