Planning a flight

It depends on what airplane you are flying.
The slower the airplane, the longer the "point-of-no-return" zone in the
middle of the lake.
Are you flying into a headwind or tailwind?
Calculate your glide distance and airspeed to determine where you can
and cannot make it from.

"jsmith" wrote in message
...
It depends on what airplane you are flying.
The slower the airplane, the longer the "point-of-no-return" zone in the
middle of the lake.
Are you flying into a headwind or tailwind?
Calculate your glide distance and airspeed to determine where you can and
cannot make it from.

I will be in a Pa28-181 and I suspect flying west to east there might be a
tail wind as the norm but will just depend on the weather. In my OP I did
say the trip was in July.

Flying over long stretches of water does not bother me that much as it has
to be done in the UK if you want to go anywhere interesting (besides which
with AVGAS at $7.50 a gallon some routings are just not worth it).

My philosophy is that an airplane engine does not know whether it is over
land or water and as long as you can fly high enough then the margin of
safety increases.

It is why learning to trim the plane for best glide is a really useful
exercise and so important as is the ignoring the temptation to stretch the
glide out. Its worth studying the L/D diagrams to convince yourself that
it does not work.

Chris