Cross-Country to Minneapolis

On April 20th, I flew in a 172 from 3SQ (St. Charles Municipal) to KSGS (South St. Paul Fleming Airport just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota). The entire trip was 8.7 cross-country hours. It required my using 4 charts with one of the sectionals front and back. (5 sides basically).

Here is how I was shown to complete the dreadful task of plotting the entire route on so many charts.

1. Locate a nearby VOR to the departure airport.

2. Place a piece of papers edge on the center of the VOR and over your course. In my case it was 159.

3. Draw a parallel line to the papers edge from the departure airport as far down the sectional as needed.

4. Line up the next sectional and use the overlapped spot as your starting point for your next line.

5. Repeat 1-4 up to the destination airport locating a VOR near the starting point for your next line.

I filed IFR, flew "VFR On Top" and experienced 1.3 hours of "actual" to Minneapolis with one stop at KBRL (Southeast Iowa Regional Airport). I filed and flew non-stop VFR returning to 3SQ.

The purpose of the trip was not only for my Instrument training, but, my brother was to obtain recurrency training in the CRJ Simulator. I had the pleasure of sitting in on all of his recurrency training. It consisted of a written and a "Walk-a-Round". That entailed looking at a slide presentation of the CRJ and identifying and discussing the purpose of items on the outside of the plane. After a lunch break at "Jimmy Johns", we returned for the last part of the training, a 3 hour CRJ Flight Simulator training. Again, I was able to "sim along". I could feel everything from running over the cracks while taxiing to taking off, steep turns, stalls, approaches, emergency landings and more. And, I could see everything out the window...... buildings, runway, lights, ground.

The next day I completed flight planning for our return home while my brother completed his checkride. He passed with flying sim colors.