Flying Friday: fall break at Niagara Falls

Every year, my wife’s daughters have a school break the first or second week of October. Last year, we’d planned their first visit to Canada, but work intervened and instead we all went to Denmark. Sorry, not sorry. This year, we’d planned a makeup trip to visit Niagara Falls, plus a side trip to Vermont to see my sister and her family. It ended up being a terrific trip that vividly demonstrated the value and utility of GA airplane travel.

Our parameters were pretty simple: we had from Saturday morning until Thursday evening, bookended by football games, to do whatever we were going to do. The Baron has about 5 hours flying range (including IFR reserves) but, for everyone’s comfort, I prefer a maximum stage length of about 3.5 hours. That meant a fuel stop somewhere in the mid-Atlantic region. We went through several iterations of plans, based on the availability and cost of lodging in Niagara and Montpelier, before we arrived at our final plans. For example, originally we wanted to fly up and stop overnight at the Flying W Airport to take advantage of their unique pool… but it closes for the season on Labor Day, and there’s no hotel there anyway. Here’s how the trip went.

Day 1: Huntsville to Hagerstown to Jersey City

Our first leg was easy: Huntsville to Hagerstown, 526nm in 3:17. The weather was clear and ATC sent us direct. We landed and parked at Rider Jet Center so we could have lunch at their restaurant, The Grille at Runways. In fact, we picked Hagerstown specifically because of this restaurant, and it lived up to expectations. I also bought a can of Prist glass cleaner, and I’m glad I did: it worked far better than Plexus, which is hard to find nowadays anyway.

Erica had booked us a room in Jersey City at a Hyatt that’s right on the Hudson River waterfront. I had been debating whether to fly into Linden or Teterboro. This was a fun planning exercise. The diagram below helps to illustrate why. Teterboro is in the upper-right corner; Linden is at the bottom left. Our hotel was right near the green flag labeled “CLOCK”– so from a ground transport perspective, either would do. Teterboro is much busier, but Linden is often more difficult to use because of its position next to Newark’s airspace. What finally decided me in favor of TEB was that their fuel was significantly cheaper. I filed and briefed to Teterboro while the Rider crew topped off the tanks and we took off.

I had filed a direct routing because I know the secret: in complex airspace, it doesn’t matter what you ask for in your flight plan. The FAA’s computers will spit out a route based on a bunch of factors, including letters of agreement between adjoining ATC fiefdoms, expected traffic, terrain, and weather, and you may end up flying a different route anyway (more on that later!) The route they assigned was actually KHGR SCAPE ETX FJC STW KTEB–we actually approached Teterboro from just north of the Essex County airport shown above. We ended up flying that route. Teterboro typically uses different runways for arrival and departure, so they were having all arrivals fly the ILS Z approach to runway 6.

Although the NYC airspace is super busy and the controllers talk fast, the en route, arrival, and approach were all straightforward. We parked at Meridian, where I’d made us a reservation, and grabbed a Lyft to the hotel. I snapped a quick photo showing the hundreds of millions of dollars of business jets parked just on one side of us– my whole airplane costs less than the landing gear on that plane directly behind me.

The hotel was perfectly nice; by far the best thing about it was its location. As promised, it was right on the riverfront, with easy walking access to restaurants and a few shops. We dropped our bags off and went out to go wander around and explore.

We walked down to the Colgate clock, took a bunch of selfies and photos with the city in the background, and then went to bed.

Day 2: Teterboro to Niagara International

Erica had booked tickets for the pedestal tour at the Statue of Liberty, but with the threat of a government shutdown looming we decided to cancel the advance tickets to make sure we didn’t lose out. As it turned out, there weren’t any pedestal tickets available, so we settled for the standard tour of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty island. Both were fantastic– I thoroughly enjoyed Ellis Island and learned a great deal from the museum exhibits. (Example fun fact: between 1896 and 1924, there was 3x as much immigration to the US from Canada as from Mexico.)

We had a late lunch at the White Horse Tavern, then headed back to Teterboro, where sadly the airplane wasn’t ready as promised. There were three or four uniformed security guards milling around, and our suspicion was that they were there because Taylor Swift was due in town for the Jets-Chiefs game. Unfortunately we left before she got there. I wasn’t too sad, though, because I had planned to fly the Hudson River corridor on the way out.

The FAA has defined two routes that you can take to overfly the river (along with a required training course you have to do before you fly it!) The low route (“Hudson River exclusion”) doesn’t have air traffic control services, and it’s quite busy with sightseeing helicopters. The slightly higher route (“Skyline route”) keeps you in contact with ATC. You’re allowed to do either route, as long as you follow the rules. Because we were leaving Teterboro, which is in controlled airspace, the easiest arrangement was to depart Teterboro with VFR flight following, fly the Skyline route while talking to the various air traffic domains, and then pick up an IFR clearance for the flight to Niagara. I had planned for us to leave Teterboro to the north, fly to the Alpine Tower, and then follow the river south down to the bay, turn around, and fly north on the east bank of the river. I attached a GoPro to the tail tiedown to capture it, and that was a great decision– the video looks terrific. The segment below is midflight– just before overflying the Verrazzano bridge and making the turn in the bay.

Originally, I wanted us to fly to the St Catherine’s airport on the Canadian side of the falls. I got a US customs sticker and did all the CANPASS paperwork (pro tip: send the paperwork to the British Columbia office, they’ll turn it around in a couple of days) in anticipation, but then I found out that St. Catherine’s is a limited-service airport. No rental cars, no real Uber service, and no tie-downs. Reluctantly, I instead planned to go to Niagara Falls International (KIAG), which turned out to be a perfectly nice airport. I had filed an IFR plan from Newark to Niagara, which I activated once we were off the Hudson skyline route. 1.9 hours of flying time total got us there just as the sun was setting, then we picked up our rental car and headed across the border.

Days 3-4: Niagara Falls

Since this is Flying Friday, I’ll confine my recap of our time in Niagara to the real highlights: seeing the falls from Maid of the Mist, eating donuts and wonton soup at Country Fresh, doing the free walking tour at Niagara-On-the-Lake, and touring the Niagara Parks Power Station. By design, we completely avoided all the tourist-trap stuff on Clifton Hill. We did an all-day bus tour that included the boat trip, a visit to the Skylon Tower, and lunch at the (I am not making this up) Hungry Moose.

One thing I didn’t do: overfly the falls. You have to be at or above 3500′, and there’s a steady procession of sightseeing traffic right at 3500′. I didn’t think the sight would be all that great, so we skipped it.

Day 5: Niagara to Montpelier

When it was time to go, we crossed back over to the US side, handed the keys to our rental car to the friendly FBO staff, and headed out. Remember earlier how I talked about how ATC will just assign you whatever they want to? I had originally filed a route that I thought would keep me out of the military operating areas (MOAs) along my route (those brown polygons in the map extract below). What did ATC clear me for? A direct route. As soon as Niagara Approach handed me off to the next sector, guess what I heard? “N421BJ, I have an amendment to your route…” We ended up flying up and over the MOAs, but the girls were all heads-down reading and fiddling with their phones, and we had a nice tailwind, so no one except me cared.

Montpelier is an interesting little airport. It’s sited in some fairly high terrain, and if the weather had been IMC I probably would have just flown into Burlington instead. As it was, I passed Burlington just as an F35 was arriving, and there was quite a bit of other traffic in the area, so Montpelier worked out really well. We parked, shut down, and took off with my sister for lunch and some sightseeing, including the Ben & Jerry’s factory tour. (For discussion another time: our hilariously weird AirBnb in Montpelier and the steady parade of tour buses carrying leaf peepers.)

Day 6: Montpelier to Latrobe to Huntsville

I posted on BeechTalk to ask for route suggestions, and a couple of people recommended stopping at Latrobe, PA to eat at DeNunzio’s, the restaurant there. So we did! Our first leg was about 3.1 hours with a noticeable headwind, but nice clear skies and no hassle from ATC. After landing, we walked over to the restaurant and, reader, let me tell you: it was fantastic. I had the lasagna, and it was more than I could finish– which is pretty rare. The airplane and pax were both full, so off we went back into the headwinds, with increasing cloud coverage. The leg home took a little over 3 hours; we landed, unloaded, and gratefully made our way home to see the dogs.

Summary

This trip is a terrific example of how well GA can work for travel. It would have been both expensive and inconvenient to do a similar itinerary by commercial air, and I don’t even want to think about the hassle (and exhaustion) incumbent on driving a trip like this. In the end, I logged 14.2 hours total. I didn’t total up my fuel costs (which is a good thing; avgas is significantly more expensive in the northeastern US than it is where I usually fly), but I’d guesstimate it was probably about $1500. For that price, maybe I could have gotten us all to and from NYC. I’ll call this one a win, and I’m already looking forward to our next trip.