A couple of us flew from KJYO to KPTB (Petersburg, Va Dinwiddie airport) yesterday. You can see a graphic of the router (saved from my Garmin, Forerunner305 gps watch) here. The first aircraft we had reserved preflighted perfectly and looked good. We were about to taxi from the runup area to the holdshort on runway 35 and noticed that the right fuel tank gauge had dropped to zero. We tried several things (cycle master, shutdown/start) and could not get to it change. It was showing the level fine during preflight so we had no idea what had happened to it. Working fuel gauges are required equipment so we had to taxi it back and then were lucky enough to have had another 172S available so we took that one instead. The flight was uneventful with the route we took being KJYO-JASEN-CSN-FAK-KPTB. The KCJR (Culpeper, Va airport) area was busy and we saw 4 or 5 planes around us while transiting over it. We had a PCAS MRX with us and it was helpful in letting us know that other aircraft were in the vicinity. ATC let us know most of the time when we needed to keep an eye out (we were VFR so it was up to us to watch anyway). The pattern in KPTB was a little busy but we were on the 150 radial from the FAK VOR so that put us almost on a 45 degree entry into the downwind for runway 5 at KPTB which made it a bit easier.
The return flight was a little bumpy at points but not bad. The next thing that happened was ATC cleared us to turn to KJYO (below class bravo airspace at KIAD) before we got to the JASEN intersection. This is generally a good thing because it's a little quicker getting home but it does mean that the view is different than we usually get from JASEN so we actually couldn't see KJYO until 7 or 8 miles out. Something like that has happened once or twice in the past and it does teach you to be familiar with getting to your destination regardless of the direction you might end up getting there.
We each got about 1.5 hours of xc (cross country) time. 50 xc hours are required before you can take the practical test for your instrument rating so we each have around 28 hours to go (and way more instrument training).
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I forgot to mention one more thing, once again the AWOS (weather) freq for KCJR had changed and I missed it in the NOTAM (SVC AWOS 119.325 VICE 123.875. WIE UNTIL UFN. CREATED: 20 OCT 21:25 2008) until we were near there trying to get the weather and couldn't hear it until I went back to the printed route NOTAMS that I carry).
I am going to make myself check each NOTAM off individually from now on to guarantee that I won't miss things like that again.
I forgot one more thing, we do not use the autopilot (AP) much (at all really) so I was determined to get comfortable with it on the return flight. We did preflight it with no trouble (there are AP preflight steps if you haven't read them). When we got into cruise on the return I tried to turn it on and it would not come on. After a minute I remembered that the POH said that the turn coordinator (TC) had to be working for the AP to work. I looked at the TC and, sure enough, a little red flag had popped up on it indicating that it had failed. We could have tried to troubleshoot it by cycling the master switch but we figured that the engine was turning just fine so we didn't need to mess with it so hand flying was the order of the day.
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