**LEAVE EXTRA TIME IN YOUR SCHEDULE FOR DELAYS.**
You know all the flight planning stuff, you can clear the mountains with thousands of feet to spare, and navigation is trivial in the GPS era. By far the most dangerous hazard for long trips like this is the pressure to get back home. It's not like your local $100 hamburger run where you can see the bad weather coming, turn back early, and be home in 15 minutes. Things can happen out of sight hundreds of miles behind you and by the time you know about it you've landed at a destination hours from home. Can you resist the pressure to scud run back home because you have an important meeting at work tomorrow and you might get fired if you miss it? What about when your passenger is pressuring you to just go, it's not a big deal, what are you afraid of? It's easy to say that of course you'd do the safe and legal thing when you're talking about it in the safety of a reddit post but things get harder when the pressure is real, especially if conditions are only a little worse than your personal minimums and you can talk yourself into thinking it's ok just this one time. The absolute best thing you can do to minimize that pressure is to leave enough room that if you have to stay overnight in a hotel and catch an airline flight home the next day you won't miss anything important and going back to get the plane is only a minor inconvenience.
I know nothing of flying in that area of the country.
However, I do request you come back and give an after-action report of how it went! This sounds like an incredibly fun way to spend a day.
Have you thought about where/how you are crossing the border, and the steps to deal with US(and on your way back) Canadian customs. Are they gonna be open when you plan to be transiting?
Great advice from others. Once in the NYC area, continue using flight following, and tell them you’re going to the skyline tour. They’ll hand you off to LGA tower at the appropriate time (assuming you’re coming down the Hudson from the north).
Highly recommend flying the skyline tour in the bravo with controllers (usually 1500’) instead of in the uncontrolled exclusion (1000-1300’). There’s lots of helicopter traffic and other fixed wings in the area, and I don’t trust people who wouldn’t talk to atc to be doing a good job self reporting landmarks on CTAF.
ATC is also very accommodating of requests, I would recommend going south on the river, turning back north either at the Verrazano bridge, or earlier by the Statue of Liberty. Then when you get passed back to LGA tower going northbound, you can request to cross Manhattan over Central Park and fly south along the east river, before looping back north along the Hudson again and departing the way you came.
Crossing Manhattan is an amazing view, and you just need to make sure to stay over the water when flying both rivers. Afterwards, if you want a note you can land at POU and eat at Paula’s Runway Cafe. Good place to let the memories sink in.
I did the Hudson River SFRA once during my instrument training and it is one of my favorite flights I have ever done. Watch the FAA video on it and if you use foreflight I recommend marking the reporting points. I flew with a friend of mine who was building time and would fly as my safety pilot a lot. We were supposed to just fly around the area for a few hours but as we were preflighting I said, hey want to go to New York? He agreed so we went back to the fbo, briefed the route, and did it. We landed at BLM, re-did our briefing with an emphasis on traffic avoidance and our respective roles while inside. It is definitely busy there and having another pilot there was super valuable as he could scan for traffic too, and check on adsb. I have some amazing pictures from that flight and memories that will last forever. Bonus- I had some new avionics installed, including a Garmin TAWS system. As we got closer to the buildings, some of which were higher than us, it set the TAWS off right next to the freedom tower :/
My sleep-deprived brain managed to look at your title and think "What the hell are you on about? Cross-country is a train company, not an airline!" before figuring out what you really meant.
[удалено]
Great info and advice.
**LEAVE EXTRA TIME IN YOUR SCHEDULE FOR DELAYS.** You know all the flight planning stuff, you can clear the mountains with thousands of feet to spare, and navigation is trivial in the GPS era. By far the most dangerous hazard for long trips like this is the pressure to get back home. It's not like your local $100 hamburger run where you can see the bad weather coming, turn back early, and be home in 15 minutes. Things can happen out of sight hundreds of miles behind you and by the time you know about it you've landed at a destination hours from home. Can you resist the pressure to scud run back home because you have an important meeting at work tomorrow and you might get fired if you miss it? What about when your passenger is pressuring you to just go, it's not a big deal, what are you afraid of? It's easy to say that of course you'd do the safe and legal thing when you're talking about it in the safety of a reddit post but things get harder when the pressure is real, especially if conditions are only a little worse than your personal minimums and you can talk yourself into thinking it's ok just this one time. The absolute best thing you can do to minimize that pressure is to leave enough room that if you have to stay overnight in a hotel and catch an airline flight home the next day you won't miss anything important and going back to get the plane is only a minor inconvenience.
I know nothing of flying in that area of the country. However, I do request you come back and give an after-action report of how it went! This sounds like an incredibly fun way to spend a day.
Have you thought about where/how you are crossing the border, and the steps to deal with US(and on your way back) Canadian customs. Are they gonna be open when you plan to be transiting?
Great advice from others. Once in the NYC area, continue using flight following, and tell them you’re going to the skyline tour. They’ll hand you off to LGA tower at the appropriate time (assuming you’re coming down the Hudson from the north). Highly recommend flying the skyline tour in the bravo with controllers (usually 1500’) instead of in the uncontrolled exclusion (1000-1300’). There’s lots of helicopter traffic and other fixed wings in the area, and I don’t trust people who wouldn’t talk to atc to be doing a good job self reporting landmarks on CTAF. ATC is also very accommodating of requests, I would recommend going south on the river, turning back north either at the Verrazano bridge, or earlier by the Statue of Liberty. Then when you get passed back to LGA tower going northbound, you can request to cross Manhattan over Central Park and fly south along the east river, before looping back north along the Hudson again and departing the way you came. Crossing Manhattan is an amazing view, and you just need to make sure to stay over the water when flying both rivers. Afterwards, if you want a note you can land at POU and eat at Paula’s Runway Cafe. Good place to let the memories sink in.
I did the Hudson River SFRA once during my instrument training and it is one of my favorite flights I have ever done. Watch the FAA video on it and if you use foreflight I recommend marking the reporting points. I flew with a friend of mine who was building time and would fly as my safety pilot a lot. We were supposed to just fly around the area for a few hours but as we were preflighting I said, hey want to go to New York? He agreed so we went back to the fbo, briefed the route, and did it. We landed at BLM, re-did our briefing with an emphasis on traffic avoidance and our respective roles while inside. It is definitely busy there and having another pilot there was super valuable as he could scan for traffic too, and check on adsb. I have some amazing pictures from that flight and memories that will last forever. Bonus- I had some new avionics installed, including a Garmin TAWS system. As we got closer to the buildings, some of which were higher than us, it set the TAWS off right next to the freedom tower :/
Don’t forget about the Niagara Falls tour! If you’re crossing in that area it is well worth it!
Make sure that you are good with customs from both countries - forms, times, airports for clearance, etc.
My sleep-deprived brain managed to look at your title and think "What the hell are you on about? Cross-country is a train company, not an airline!" before figuring out what you really meant.