This past Monday, which was Memorial Day here in the United States, I did something I've been wanting to do for some time. I flew over the Cascade mountains. My destination was Bowers Field in Ellensburg, WA. My goal was to accomplish the following:
- Verify that I could, indeed, fly over the Cascades to eastern Washington.
- Get some experience at flying at higher altitudes.
- Get a feel for how my airplane performs at those altitudes.
I used FlyQ to generate a VFR flight plan and filed it after a couple of course tweaks. I left the altitudes at the suggested values. I filed the flight plan before leaving for the airport, then activated it right before takeoff using the Leidos EasyActivate™ Service. For those unfamiliar with this process, Leidos is the company that manages many of the flight services functions for the FAA, including filing, activating, and closing flight plans. If you have your account set up correctly, they send you an email when you file a flight plan. It contains a link you can click or tap to open their website where you can quickly activate your plan. They will then send you another email with a link you can use to close the plan. It's a really slick system that wasn't available back when I did my training, and it's well suited for use with your phone.
My cruising altitude for the flight to Ellensburg was 9,500'. As I expected, it took a while to reach that altitude, especially as I was performing a cruise climb to keep the airspeed up and engine temperature down. Even with the significant reduction in climb rate, I reached that altitude with no real difficulty and settled in for the cruise portion of the flight. The mixture control in my airplane is, shall we say, imprecise. Although I like the lever-style throttle quadrant, I definitely see the advantage of a vernier-style mixture control with it's higher precision. Nevertheless, I was able to cruise along at about 2500 rpm, consuming less than 10 gph, and doing about 100 knots TAS. The wind at that altitude was calm so the ground speed indicated on my iPad was close to that on my airspeed indicator.
At about 20 nm from Bowers Field, I started my descent. That worked out pretty well from a timing standpoint and I arrived at the field at about 1000 ft. above pattern altitude. I flew over the field to determine wind direction, then circled around to enter the left traffic pattern for a landing on runway 29.
The landing was pretty good, if I may say so. I didn't do a touch and go, but taxied off the runway and then back to the end for take off. Bowers is at 1800' MSL so the takeoff roll was a bit longer than at Harvey, but it also has a 4300' runway so I had plenty of room. I climbed out, then trimmed for an initial 500 fpm climb rate up to my target altitude for the return trip. As I was now on a heading between 180 and 360 degrees, the altitude was 8500'.
The flight back was as uneventful, peaceful, and beautiful as the flight over. Again, at about 20nm from Harvey I started my descent and again the timing worked out reasonably well. As I approached and listened to the radio traffic, I realized that Harvey Field had opened up the grass runway for use. I landed on the asphalt, but then decided to do a soft field take off and landing, as I hadn't done one since my initial training, let alone in Ariel.
The grass runway at Harvey is close to the asphalt runway. Technically it is runway 15R/33L and the asphalt is 15L/33R. In practice, it's treated more like a single runway with two surfaces to choose from. There is only one pattern, and each aircraft uses one or the other. There are no parallel operations.
The Musketeer airframe is rather robust so it handled the grass runway with ease. It was bumpy, but I think I did reasonably well on take off, holding the nose up, lifting off earlier than normal, then leveling out to build some airspeed before climbing out. My landing was a bit firmer than I'd like, but the plane soaked it up with no problem. I don't intend to use the grass for take off when I'm heavy, but it was cool to get some soft field practice in.
All in all, I was able to accomplish my objectives for this flight. I'm now confident that I can handle flying over to eastern Washington given good weather conditions. The most important aspect, I think, was the altitude. I've never been that high in an unpressurized aircraft. While the effect on my engine was obvious, I didn't observe any ill effects to myself. I was able to breathe normally and couldn't detect any issues caused by the reduced oxygen levels. This was expected, as I was still below the altitude at which supplemental oxygen is required, but only just. The regs require oxygen if you're between 10,000' and 12,000' for more than 30 minutes, and at all times above 12,000'. For my part, I don't intend to go above 10,000' at all without it.
On the way back, as I was looking out at the mountains and the blue sky with its occasional clouds, I came to understand that I was truly blessed to be able to do this. While millions, even billions of people have seen the world from that height, and even higher, only a relative few are able to do so at the controls of their own aircraft. Every time I fly, I'm grateful that I can do so, and I hope I never stop being so.
Here are some photos I took during the flight.
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