Lance update

Somebody clicked the “buy it now” and bought the Lance. The speed at which it sold this time says that maybe we could have gotten a bit higher price, but this gives us time to deliver it before the annual runs out.

We’re not sure if the buyer is going to come to pick it up, or if he’ll want it delivered. I volunteered if it’s the latter. The buyer is in South Dakota, which means taking the longest trip I’ve ever made in a private plane. But even if I don’t end up delivering it, I enjoy flight planning, so here’s what I did.

The first thing I did was plug a direct route into airnav.com’s fuel stop planner. The great circle route goes directly over two Great Lakes, and with this engine and this weather, that’s not going to happen. So then I started looking for routes between the lakes. I figured something through south western Ontario and then towards Chicago, then up the backside of Lake Michigan would do nicely. That ended up being around 1100 nautical miles, which I could divide into legs of 400, 300 and 400 miles. The 300 mile leg in the middle would give me more flexibility if Chicago Center gave me an option of going north over the lake or way south and started vectoring me all over the place.

So I plotted a route towards Chicago, and started looking for likely airports at around the 400 mile mark. South Bend looks like it would do. Plugging that into Aeroplanner.com’s flight planner got me a route of KROC v2 YQO v464 SVM v116 JXN v221 LINGS KSBN. I’ll have to check that out on a new low altitude en-route chart, but it looks ok on my ancient Howie Keefe’s Atlas.

Next, I was looking for a 300 mile leg past Chicago. Rochester MN (aka “the other Rochester”) looks like it would do. Plugging that into Aeroplanner had me going on a airway across Lake Michigan, so I added JOT (Joliet VOR) as an intermediate point and forced the route to stay south of Chicago’s class B airspace. That gave me a route of KSBN INKEN v126 JOT RFD UKN LEFTY EMORE KRST. I don’t have my Atlas here at work so I can’t fill in the airway numbers for the last part.

Now the last leg, to the destination. Since I probably shouldn’t tell you exactly where I’m going for privacy reasons (although you can probably look it up on FlightAware after the plane gets there), I’ll just say that one starts off KRST RST RWF ATY ABR. So now all that’s left is figuring out where I’m going to overnight on this trip, and then I have to figure out how to get home on commercial airlines. I’m not sure if I’d do the trip out as two legs, sleep, then one leg, or one leg, sleep, then two legs. I don’t think I’m up to flying 8.5 hours in one day, but on the other hand I don’t think I’d need three days for it.