What a journey it has been. Jeff Miller (me) and Alan Sargone headed out of Van Nuys , CA flying Miss Behavin’ to Charleston, South Carolina in one day. This was something around a 2200 mile flight. I have so much to journal about but we’re pooped, so I’ll try.

First we left Van Nuys around 7 am and quickly (kinda) climbed to FL190 (19,000 feet). Of course we needed oxygen to breathe at this altitude…but we were freezing in the -19 degree Celsius temperature as Miss Behavin’s heat would not work. Finally an hour into the flight, somewhere near Big Bear I think, the heat started working.

We flew for several hours in the clouds but did not accumulate any rime ice since it was too cold to stick to our dear Miss Behavin’. She shivered but would not freeze. Alan and I were tickled when a controller we were talking to asked if we were pressurized, which of course we are not. We replied no, we were just breathing oxygen. Most Skylane T182T do not fly at this altitude. So, we did feel a little special. No big deal, but it was a tickle.

When we approached to land in Amarillo, Texas we were happy to be ending our 5 hours or so of flying. I made a huge mistake on my approach to landing. I added 30 degrees of flaps to slow my landing down and had completely forgotten the tower told me that there were 35 knot gusts of wind. I did a near perfect soft landing, then a gust came up and I thought Miss Behavin’ was going to do a cartwheel. We were up on one wheel precariously ready to loose our center of gravity and flip over. All I could think was how embarrassing this would be…Alan was more concerned with his well being. I thought for sure we would flip over but somehow I used skill and luck to keep us from doing a ground looping cartwheel. That taught me a huge lesson…flaps in not down during landing with high winds.

Take off out of Amarillo was no joy either…the density altitude was high and it took forever to climb back up to FL190.

We enjoyed journeying past the Great Mississippi River and prepared to land in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Problem number two was forced on us by a silly flight controller. First they dropped us off radar while on an instrument approach to the airport while in actual IMC (in the clouds and blind), then they told us to pick another approach when we were only 4100 feet in the air and 4 miles from the airport. Alan worked feverishly to find an approach while I tried to keep Miss Behavin’ and me from getting disoriented. We finally got down on the ground to find an abandoned airport at night. We were tired and thought of spending the night but found that no taxi cabs even came out to the airport at night. We called Don Ratliff in Charleston, he made a call and found the Bama aviation across the runway to be open and we taxied ov er, got fuel, and got out of there. Bad Karma.

We landed in Charleston, South Carolina at 2 am east coast time…and without drama, we found a hotel and crashed out.

We spent most of Wednesday with Don Ratliff, a wonderful character and renowned ferry pilot to discuss our upcoming flight across the North Atlantic. Don was all that I hoped he would be. Sally his darling girlfriend met us for lunch and a good time was had by all.

Later in the afternoon Alan and I flew a quick 3 and half hours to Fort Meyers, Florida. It’s almost 12 at night and now I’m going to catch up on some sleep. I’ll chat with you again as soon as I can.