a friend and i were planning on picking up some cross country hours last weekend. originally, the weather looked bad and then appeared to get better so we planned a long (for us) flight from JYO-CHO-FCI-OKV-JYO with us splitting the flying time to pick up the hours. we were due to t/o from JYO at 0930 and had filed the first leg and ADIZ exit flight plans via duats. unfortunately, we ran into a new problem during the preflight. we noticed that the left aileron push rod appeared to be bent and was touching the edge of the access hole in the wing. we had never seen this before and both pondered the implications and decided to get a chief flight instructor to look at it. he went out and held the aileron and had me try to turn the yoke to the right and it didn't move. then, i tried turning it to the left and it turned a pretty significant distance (a bad thing). this meant the plane could not be flown so we had to find another one. the only one available was a 172-S (we usually fly 172-R) which meant we had to take a renter's exam (which meant some review of the performance/limitation info). we've both flown in S's before but always with an instructor. after passing the exam we then had to get updated weather, pre-flight and re-file flight plans. this all took quite a while and we were now looking at a 1pm or later departure. we finally got off the ground after that and immediately ran into unexpected turbulence. we evaluated spending the rest of the afternoon behind schedule, in potentially worsening weather and it being a roughish ride and elected to turn back. this is where the ADIZ lesson comes in. had i been flying solo i would probably have just entered the JYO ADIZ ingress transponder code and turned back. however, we had only filed the egress leg expecting to file ingress later on the return. luckily, my friend had experienced something similar before with an instructor and pointed out that we needed to contact ATC and request a squawk code for return to JYO. that took a couple of minutes and we were on our way home. the funny thing was, after all that time we had not gotten very far (we probably could have walked the distance i think). however, it was a useful lesson in terms of ADM (aeronautical decision making), being hungry, in a hurry, hoping to avoid weather and being tired (a bad combination) and it probably kept me from having an ADIZ violation (a hot topic nowadays) so i'm glad it turned out the way it did. we can always fly another day.
we did decide that we would call the flight a cross-town vs a cross-country though.
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