in 2016 i have done 54 flights
total distance covered 12900NM according to SD
ave spped 147kts
all vfr
longest trip in one day 960NM (to Cannes and return)
longest leg of all trips 540NM (Sabadell)
longest flight time for leg of all trips 210min (Bezieres)
shortest trip (time and dist) Bolognia to LIKO (for AVGAS) 11min/ 20NM
i will try to find this winter time to do IR rating
I am not sure how long the flying legs were, but in 2014 I flew with a friend a Piper Archer 3 through Africa and we did most of the flights VFR and without autopilot. They were sometimes long legs of over 6 hours, which were possible due to the ferry tank that was installed. For IFR flights in the Cirrus SR22T, I have no problem filing straight from Rotterdam to Hungary, Italy or to Spain with reserves still in place.
Before I got the IR I flew VFR ESKC-ESMS-EDDF, about 700 NM. (Before the German reunion so it was longer than it would be now as you had to avoid DDR airspace.)
WhiskeyPapa wrote:
We know long distance IFR cross countries are a relative rarity in the piston aviation world. How much rarer are long trips VFR in SEPs?
Interesting perspective! While many VFR pilots don’t regularly fly very far, there are an order of magnitude more VFR pilots than private IFR pilots. So I would have assumed that there were more 500nn+ VFR trips than IFR ones.
While most VFR flights will be short ones, many pilots do one or two longer trips during the year.
Of course this is just my assumption, and you know what they say about assuming!
Once a year I fly a long trip with a bunch of lunatics pilots called the Intrepid Aviators. A few years back we did a tour of the whole of the UK up the east coast and down the west coast. Because I got stuck in Oban when the others flew off early one morning, this trip included my longest flight at the time – Oban (EGEO) to Perranporth (EGTP) (435nm, 3hrs 20min) to catch them up. This year the Intrepids flew to Poland, and I tagged along as far as northern Germany and then diverted south towards Munich whilst they flew further east. My flight home from Augsburg (EDMA) much delayed by weather, included another long leg from Paderborn (EDLP) to Elstree (EGTR) (389nm 3hrs 30mins). Of course, both tours were much longer than 500nm in total and we all flew VFR the whole way (except for a few of us exercising our IMCRs within the UK for some of the time).
Were it not for this group of friends, I would not, in Peter’s words, have flown off the edge of a VFR chart. Instead, thanks to the encouragement of the Intrepids I now regularly fly routes that involve a few chart changes en-route. This year I flew for the first time in Belgium, Holland and Germany and it was a real thrill.
I would encourage people to do what I did: find some bolder and more experienced pilots and tag along with them on a long trip. Getting a long way from home is simply the best fun I have had in my plane, although I do enjoy short flights too.
Howard
Within the four years of my flying, I have done a fair share of both “types” of flying. I still enjoy the local stuff! At any two digit amount of hours per year, there’s still enough new stuff to discover and I still enjoy taking people around my (and their) area. I’ve done a few trips from my home base, covering places such as Serbia, Croatia, Spain, Morocco, which were awesome and will be a life-long memory. But then I also love weekends such as the recent one when I visited family about 50 NM from where I live and decided to fly there instead of driving, just “because I can”. Those 18 minutes airborne turned what would otherwise have been a very ordinary November day into a very fine Saturday. 
I did lots of long VFR legs in my early years, pre-IR. The writeups can be found here. Possibly the longest single leg was Shoreham to Trieste which is some 700nm. I later used some of these long VFR flights to meet the FAA CPL 300nm XC requirement.
However, IFR is a lot easier so while I still use VFR for short trips within the UK (where one can go almost anywhere in Class G; the majority of my airborne time is done as VFR) I rarely do it abroad and almost never for long legs. The last long VFR leg I did was Bergerac-Lucca in 2014 and that was purely for the benefit of a passenger (PPL holder). It produced good low level photos though of the coast.
Once you get an IR you use it 
Europe’s bizzare ATC systems, with the widespread VFR (muppet pilots, no implied clearance) v. IFR (professional pilots, implied end to end clearance) presumption make IFR so much simpler. The exception might be if one really has to make a flight and the wx is really horrible; then a low level run is often possible, but this is usually unsafe except over the sea. Or if one has run out of oxygen. Neither has happened to me yet.
This summer, I made my longest single VFR leg ever : Toussus le Noble (Paris) – Corfu VFR, non-stop direct, 1,000 NM in 5h55
pre-IR, pre-Schengen, short day – March, EV-97, crusing at approx 100 kts. 2 aircraft in formation, 747 NM, landing 10 minutes before SS.
LKKU(Kunovice)-LKTB-EDMS-LFSH-LFLA-LFOU (Cholet)
