Another video from the Flying M Air YouTube channel.

Join me for the first part of my cross-country flight from McMinnville, OR back to my summer base in Malaga, WA.

In this video, I depart McMinnville, which is really rocking with pattern traffic, and head northeast into — you guessed it! — descending weather. (Seriously: just once I’d like to fly in that part of Oregon with good weather. How can people live there?) This time, I’m also dealing with a bit of wind that shakes the helicopter up every once in a while and makes me wonder whether my dogs in the back seat will puke. This part of the flight goes from McMinnville to the Columbia River and ends on a bit of a cliffhanger (pun intended).

Audio is from direct connection to the intercom, so you can hear radio chatter and me narrate the flight and make radio calls, plus dialed down volume of the helicopter’s engine/rotor noise.

Here are the videos in this series. I’ve already published videos that cover the last part of this flight, which was done a few days later:

McMinnville to Yakima, Part 1: https://youtu.be/6x6XY3-uZjo (this video)
McMinnville to Yakima, Part 2: https://youtu.be/3mmyOMzN0Ls
McMinnville to Yakima, Part 3: to come
Yakima River Canyon: https://youtu.be/1HZi_UHjK0I
Kittitas to Malaga: https://youtu.be/cRuUhyCQWMA
I should mention here that “cross-country” in the world of aviation is any long flight where you land at a different place from where you started. For airplanes, it’s 50 miles or more; for helicopters, it’s 25 miles or more. This is only part of a 178 nautical mile trip.