Has anyone flown a DA40 from Seattle through the Cascades in the summer time? My family is doing their usual coast-to-coast flight in August and my son would like to fly "north" this time.
Our usual route from KSMO is to fly out through Sedona and Albuquerque, and then direct KLEB. Usually there are a few more stops. Last summer we made it to Chicago for the first time (tornados and severe storms all other summers).
A couple years ago we flew to KHND then up through Utah into Wyoming and stopped at Jackson Hole. That was a gorgeous flight.
Looking at the Cascades I don't see a non-oxygen route that jumps out at me, though.
Seattle Flying East
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- Colin
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Seattle Flying East
Colin Summers, PP Multi-Engine IFR, ~3,000hrs
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Re: Seattle Flying East
Never been there in my plane, but looking at the charts, it seems to me that you could probably do it IFR most of the way on routes with a MOCA at 10000 or below along V2 for example, and the few segments where that's not possible in the area east of Missoula can be done VFR. I think that's less than 100 miles of VFR on that route. Now this assumes that ATC would allow you to fly at 10000 going east.
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Re: Seattle Flying East
We've flown from Portland to Illinois several times and haven't found the Cascades to be as much of a problem as the northern Rockies. V2 looks like a good option from Seattle. Once past the Cascades you can cross the Rockies via the northern route through Mullan Pass and Missoula or via the southern route through Boise and Malad City. We always carry and use oxygen, though. I much prefer to be a couple of extra thousand feet above the minimum altitude for the airways over the mountains.