![]() You want to give yourself enough extra reserves to be able to circle areas or change course as needed without worrying about fuel exhaustion. Whether you typically plan to land with the minimum 45 minutes of fuel reserve required for night flight or have a higher personal minimum, consider adding another half hour to that. You should always factor in being able to make a safe landing in case of an emergency, whether you are flying over urban areas or just off the coast to take in beach celebrations. The idea here is watching colorful dots unfold across the landscape below you. ![]() Flying lower won’t give you any increased level of detail on any one celebration. Extra altitude will help you see farther to enjoy more fireworks. Stick with the altitudes you would normally fly at night-there’s no need to fly lower to see the displays. The displays don’t last for long, so get there too soon or too late and you’ll miss out. If you need to fly to an urban area, plan to leave in enough time to reach the area just after sunset so that the rest of your route is covered around dark. Most fireworks displays start at dark, so timing is important. The city will likely have a celebration, but the suburbs will likely light up too with backyard events. Plan your route to cover the most towns or cities named on the sectional chart-even better if your route goes along cities big enough to be charted in yellow. ![]() The fireworks displays aren’t huge from the air, so in sparsely populated areas, you wouldn’t be able to see very many. We made it back to Frederick just in time to watch the city’s grand finale from the air-a perfect finale to our Independence Day celebration.Īlthough luck gave my husband and me aerial front-row seats to dozens of fireworks displays, a little planning can help you maximize the number of celebrations you see from the cockpit. And we got to enjoy them all, just the two of us, while enjoying one of our special freedoms-flying. For most of the 1.5-hour flight home, we watched mushroom-shaped bursts of color flash as far as we could see in every direction, each one representing some kind of celebration-a family or group of friends enjoying a backyard barbecue, a city capping off a day of festivities. As it grew darker along our route, fireworks displays started to dot the landscape. Time for plan B: Fly back after the storms cleared and circle overhead the fireworks display before landing.Īfter enjoying dinner on the boardwalk, we rode our bikes back to the airport, folded and loaded them in our Cessna 170, and headed home at sunset. However, pop-up thunderstorms along our route prevented us from leaving in time to make it back to Frederick. When the July Fourth holiday fell midweek in 2018, my husband and I decided to make a daytrip from Maryland to Ocean City, New Jersey, to relax at the beach and fly home in time to ride our bicycles from Frederick Municipal Airport to Baker Park downtown for the fireworks celebration.
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