Cross-Country Flying Stories
Cross-country flying stories from Bill Cox offer fantastic insight into what pilots face on long distance flights. Dig into our X-Country Log today.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 Ferry Flying As A Career?
It’s not the glamorous life everyone thinks it is
 I receive more e-mail and snail mail from readers about ferry flying than on all other subjects combined. |
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 From Hero To Bum—Almost
You can learn from your mistakes…if you can just survive them
 It was January 1989, and I had just delivered a new Grand Caravan to Comair in Johannesburg, South Africa. |
Tuesday, July 7, 2009 Dodging The Tornados
“Oh, by the way, could you drive a new T182 back from Lakeland, Fla., to Long Beach, Calif.?”
 There are worse jobs in aviation. It was during the last two days of Sun ’n Fun 2009 that I got the call from Tom Jacobson of Tom’s Aircraft in Long Beach. |
Tuesday, May 26, 2009 Singapore By Bonanza
Flying a Bonanza to Singapore offers an education in “managing” thunderstorms
 He was a regular reader of this space and he called a while back wondering if I’d be interested in ferrying his pristine A36TC Bonanza from El Monte, Calif., to Singapore. Gee, lemme think about that for 30 seconds.
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Tuesday, April 21, 2009 Traveling By “Corporate” Airplane
A local breakfast flight emphasizes the value of corporate aviation
 I’ve owned personal airplanes almost since I earned my pilot’s license 43 years ago. I didn’t buy my first airplane, a Globe Swift, specifically for business (in fact, I don’t recall ever flying it in conjunction with a story), but most of the half-dozen airplanes I’ve owned since have been employed primarily in pursuit of profit. |
Tuesday, March 24, 2009 Why Retract?
To retract or not to retract? That is the question.
 My first airplane was a retractable, but it was sometimes hard to tell. It was a purely stock 1946 Globe Swift GC1B, and while the main wheels would retract—eventually—there often seemed to be little effect on performance. Though the airplane was a cute little devil and a fairly primo example of its kind, its performance was a country mile behind the “book.” |
Tuesday, February 24, 2009 Return To Goose Bay
There’s nothing so constant as change. Trouble is, change is hard to come by in the far north.
 When I returned to Goose Bay, Labrador, Canada, in early December to complete the delivery of the world’s brightest Marchetti (yellow and red with blue stars, formerly owned by an air show pilot), I was hoping it was cold enough that ice season was pretty much over. It was, but not without a few dying gasps.
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Tuesday, January 27, 2009 Always The Weather
Fall, not winter, is the tough time in some parts of the world
 If there’s one absolute truth about flying the North Atlantic in normally aspirated piston aircraft, it’s ice. Those pilots who’ve been flying the ocean at low level for a few years recognize airframe icing as perhaps the most dangerous threat.
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Tuesday, December 2, 2008 Renewal
A simple, four-hour round-trip helps remind me of the reliability of GA airplanes
 In most recognizable respects, the trip was hardly unusual. It was just an easy 280 nm hop from Long Beach to Groveland, Calif., for a speaking engagement before the Pine Mountain Lake Aviation Association, a typical out-and-back, 1+50 hop in the LoPresti Mooney, precursor to at least a four-pack of 400 to 600 nm trips around the Southwest.
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Saturday, November 1, 2008 Ode To The Fast Lane
General aviation answers a question that wasn’t important until recently
 I wouldn’t want to be riding out on the wing tonight. The wind is roaring down out of the north like a polar bear’s breath—a vicious torrent of air frozen by winter and twisted by the Rocky Mountains. Somewhere below, far down in a blanket of black sky four miles deep, the night snow of November blitzes New Mexico and Colorado into immobility.
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