The Extra Flies South: September 2007

At the end of September, I flew the Extra 300L south from its summer home at Galvin Flying Services at Boeing Field (KBFI) in Seattle to its winter quarters at Boulder City, NV (KBVU).

The Route

The monsoons usually return the Seattle area around the end of September or early October, so I took advantage of a break in the weather and enjoyed good VFR weather for the entire trip. That's really the only way to fly the Extra 300L; it is certificated only for day-VFR operations.

You can download both the planned route and the GPS track (.kmz) from my Garmin 396 from one of my Skydrive folders. The files in that folder are (small) .kmz files for use with Google Earth.

If Google Earth (a free download) is installed on your system, you can open the .kmz files in that application and see both the planned route and track superimposed on the Earth.

I use the Voyager Flight Software System to plan my flights. That nifty tool lets me dump routs directly into the Garmin 396 and to Google Earth. Getting the tracks that the GPS records back into Google Earth requires a couple of simple steps.

You can zoom in and out, tilt the display, etc. to see my meanderings. You can also change the color and thickness of the lines after loading the data files in Google Earth.

For more information about using Google Earth, see the product user guide, especially the topics Setting Line Color and Width and Setting Altitude.

The track data was recorded every 10 seconds (if you if zoom in on the airports where I stopped, you'll notice some zigs—and zags—in the traffic patterns when the track file connects points).

The basic route of flight: KBFI-KCVO-KOVE-KDLO-KBVU.

The flight through the Central Valley of California adds a leg (and about 100 nm) to the trip, but I prefer this routing to the flight down the east side of the Sierra Nevada, especially in the Extra 300L. It offers many places to stop for fuel or service, or to wait out bad weather, plus good radar coverage for VFR flight following.

The track inevitably deviates from the planned route as I adjust course for terrain (I'm usually below the IFR MEA on airways) and weather.

On this trip, I also detoured around the TFR that often coincides with the airspace at Beale AFB (home of the U-2S and RQ-4) these days.

I planned to make my second fuel stop at KLHM in northern California, but according to a NOTAM, the runway was closed, hence the dogleg to Oroville (which has the virtue of relatively cheap fuel and a friendly airport cat named "Trim Tab").

Trip Stats

Total flight time: 6.7 hours to fly 1049 nm (for those of you keeping score at home, that's an average ground speed of 156 knots). The Extra has enough fuel to handle legs of roughly two hours with reserves; the route above shows the fuel stops.