The day’s mission was to get me and my Debonair from Wichita, Kansas, to Las Vegas, Nevada, in loose formation with a friend who would be flying his Piper Comanche 180. Although we had scheduled this trip weeks ago, we both presumed the other guy a) had done this before and b) knew how. Over coffee the morning of our planned departure, it quickly became obvious our presumptions were in error. That was the bad news.
The good news is we were flying the same route at the same time at the same altitude, so we could divvy up the planning workload. This was back in the dark ages, before electronic charting, so we spread out a few square meters of low altitude en route paper charts over the kitchen table and eyeballed the route together. The calculators came out, we pored over the Airport/Facility Directory, dialed up DUATS on our laptops for a weather briefing and talked to Flight Service about Notams. Since then, the technology has changed a lot, and we have some new tools as one result. But the basics of familiarizing ourselves with a new route remain pretty much the same. So do the choices.
