My original plan had me going from SLC to SFO, but it turned out that in order to safely get out of the mountains I had to head south. As long as I'm headed south, why not just hit LA? LA Center also had a controller working, which is always a good time.
I took off from SLC with my tanks half-empty, in the name of getting better climb performance out of that high-altitude airport. The trip was lengthened by a bad headwind, and I throttled up out of my usual eco cruise to get myself where I was going quicker.
I've been using Little Navmap for flight planning, it also has a neat option to interface directly with X-Plane and measure the performance of the aircraft. On some of my later longer legs I can see it being very handy to help me stretch every gallon and find the best tradeoff between speed and fuel reserves.
Fantastic tailwind on this leg, pity it was a relatively short one. If you look at the orange airspeed line you can see the tailwind dying off and I travel farther north. You'll also notice I keep it fast right up to the runway, then it drops like a rock. I had an airliner coming in right behind me and I wanted to stay out of his way. I ended up taking the aircraft basically down to the numbers at full cruise speed, then slamming the airbrake and touching it down. I was a bit surprised, previous times I'd used the airbrake the fuel tanks were nearly full and it didn't feel like it did much. This flight I had taken off with the tanks just half-full, and was down to about 50 pounds at the destination, about 15% capacity, and the aircraft stopped on a dime when the brake came out. I'm definitely going to plan on continuing to come into busier airports with a lightweight aircraft so I can keep doing this.
Next up: My first international border crossing of many, up into Canada towards Alaska.
It doesn't matter too much if I stop in Seattle or Vancouver, I'll let whichever area has controller staffing decide. Vancouver was winning today.
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