"Arnold Sten" wrote in message
...
*chop*
In addition to the above, using Flight Following means that you are in
direct contact with ATC should you develop some sort of in-flight
emergency. You can therefore communicate that difficulty immediately
without having to search for the available and appropriate controlling
agency.
A follow-up question, however: How do request flight following when you
are not actually doing a cross-country? Let's say that my flight
intentions are to fly 50 NM away from my home base in order do
sight-seeing and photo shooting, turn around (not land), and go back
home. Do I simply tell ATC of those intentions of doing nothing more
than a round robin flight? Whenever I have ask for FF, the controller
always asks for a destination. What are you supposed to say?

Arnold Sten

I had that scenario last spring, a guy wanted to fly from Columbus to an
area south of Dayton to photo a crop circle. When I got within about 20-25
miles, I got in touch with Dayton and told him my heading and roughly where
I was going. Once we spotted it, I just told him that we wanted to circle
(loiter) around our current position to do some aerial photography. He
advised us of nearby traffic a coulple of times, so we would just fly west
a little till they cleared out, Dayton being the busy place that it is. When
we were done, I just told him we wanted to depart 080 or whatever and he
advised us of traffic we may encounter on the way out.

--
Hello, my name is Mike, and I am an airplane addict....