When I had my Maule an 800 mile trip was an adventure... With my V35B I do it fairly regularly. As others have said, the dead of winter and the middle of summer are cautious times (e.g. icing and thunderstorms, respectively).

A flight instructor I know flew commercial to the east coast to help one of his students fly a new Mooney back to Denver. Took them 2 weeks because of multiple systems working their way across the US...

If you can't afford to be days late, drive.

hotrod180 wrote:You might not like what I have to say, but here's my two cents worth.....
If you are getting your pilots license (and plane) for the main purpose of commuting 800 miles each way to work, I think you may be setting yourself up for disappointment. Weather conditions will probably make it un-doable as often as not, even for an experienced pilot, esp when you have a strict time window you have to meet. You push that (esp as a newbie) & you may be setting yourself up for disaster. Plenty of pilots, even experienced ones, have killed themselves pushing weather & time due to get-there-itis. You might be better served by just continuing to drive, or by finding some sort of commercial air options, even if you have to have a car on each end.

If you want to fly for fun, and the commuting thing is just a potential side benefit, go ahead on.

I was waiting for someone to post something like this. Well stated Hotrod180.

I have family that lives about the same distance from me and it's sooo much nicer to fly than to drive. That being said, it's not a regular commute and I leave a fairly large margin for error on either end just in case. And I have had to leave two days early on both ends due to weather and still landed short of home, got a rental car for the five hour drive and returned a week later for the plane.

I also had/have a good experienced mentor and friend (also my flight instructor) who helped me with planning when I first started making the trip. You can't buy experience and he has a lot and knew how to interpret the "real" weather when I did not! I now am comfortable making those decisions on my own and I have all my alternates lined up in case I need to wait out the weather or get a rental car.

CW

I say go for it and don't be discouraged. Just over four years ago I started flying for pretty much the same reason as you are talking about. My drive to and from work was 7 hours and its 2.5 flying (@145mph). I've made that same commute monthly, sometimes weekly, for the last four years (having similar flexibility to your work schedule), and getting shut down or having to turn back has been rare. Aside from thunderstorms/turbulence/IFR conditions, I'd say the main thing you need to prepare to deal with is the density altitude in NM, oh yeah and thermals haha. I learned to fly at 1100' msl and fly in/out of the ranch (work) at roughly 5000'msl, in the summer DA's are 7-9K and boy did I show up fully ignorant when I started flying in the higher density altitudes in the summer. Plan wisely, trust your guts, respect the weather, and go for it. When I was starting out all kinds of naysayers told me I couldn't/shouldn't learn in a tailwheel, especially a 180, thank goodness I didn't listen to that advice. If flying wasn't an adventure, that would really suck IMO

You should read Contact Flying by Jim Dulin (bcp member), he has some good information that will help you out flying in the Desert mountains of the Southwest. Let us all know how it works out for ya.

Go for it getting your PPL. The 800 mile deal might start to suck ass after a while in a slow airplane. I do 950 in a T210 doing over 200mph G/S and it gets boring as all get out after a few trips. Just get your ticket and find out what works for you moving forward. We need new pilots to buy our airplanes down the road as we become old farts.. . Just buy a TBM 900