'Beyond gliding distance'

[Rick Savage]

 ‘Beyond gliding distance’
 

As you prepare to take your private, recreational, or sport pilot checkride, your flight instructor asks you increasingly detailed questions about flight planning’s risk management to ready you for queries from your designated pilot examiner.

 

Today she hands you a sectional chart and asks how you would respond to an invitation to fly your single-engine airplane from your base at Long Island MacArthur Airport in Islip, N.Y., on a direct route of 30 nautical miles to Connecticut’s Tweed-New Haven Airport. 

 

Thirty miles isn’t much—but you quickly observe that about two-thirds of the route is over a wide expanse of Long Island Sound. 

 

Is that a problem? 

Not from a regulatory point of view (although you would probably not be permitted to do this while still a student pilot). But it raises some interesting questions. 

 

The prospect of the direct flight causes you to ponder the approximate power-off glide range of your aircraft from a variety of cruise altitudes, at your aircraft’s best glide speed, considering given winds aloft. How long would you find yourself beyond gliding distance at various points along the route?  

 

You could choose a less direct route. Or you could elect to “spiral up” to cruise altitude over land before starting out over Long Island Sound, she suggests. 

 

There’s much to consider—and pilots have diverse opinions about how to proceed, making for spirited debates. 

 

Read AOPA Editor in Chief Thomas B. Haines’s discussion of the risk-assessment question in his March 2011 AOPA Pilot Waypoints column. Flight Training Editor Ian Twombly blogged in November 2008 about the considerations for an 86-nm crossing of Lake Michigan—a route well known to many pilots. 

 

Next your CFI poses a sample aviation knowledge test question: “When an aircraft is being flown over water, under what circumstance must approved flotation gear be readily available to each occupant?” 

 

Here are possible answers:

A) At night and beyond gliding distance from shore.

B) Anytime the aircraft is beyond power-off gliding distance from shore.

C) When operating for hire beyond power-off gliding distance from shore. 

 

You check the regulation and reply, “C.” Flotation devices are required when the aircraft is operated for hire over water and beyond power-off gliding distance from shore. 

 

Correct. For large aircraft, she adds, separate rules apply.