You earned the certificate. You can fly. But the big trip never leaves the ground.
You fly the same forty-mile hamburger run you have flown for years.
You think about flying somewhere real, then talk yourself out of it.
Maybe you're not chasing one big trip. You just want sharper cross-country flying and the tips and habits that make you safer.
The flying was never the problem. Everything around it was.
I asked seven pilots in the first cohort what stood between them and the trip. Their words.
The airplane rarely breaks. The plan does.
A long trip is just short trips with a plan between them.
Pick a place you have never flown and leave with a real plan and a date.
Weather, fuel, terrain, and your outs become a series of calm calls.
The part training skips carries into every trip after this one.
HOW IT WORKS · 4 CLASSES · 12 LESSONS · 90 MINUTES EACH
Four live classes on Google Meet, one a week, 90 minutes each. Three lessons per class, twelve in all. You choose a real trip in the first class, put a date on it, and plan it across the four weeks. Every worksheet you fill in stays yours, and you finish with a flight plan you can actually fly.
FROM THE FIRST COHORT
The pre-departure list of the things pilots forget before a long trip: documents, databases, and the gear that turns a long day into a smooth one. Drop your email and it lands in your inbox.
WHO'S TEACHING IT
Brian Siskind is an instrument-rated commercial pilot and FAA Ground Instructor in Nashville. He flies a 1967 Piper Cherokee named Lucy VFR to places far from home, the long way. He co-hosts the Midlife Pilot Podcast and wrote Make Small Corrections. This course is the craft he earned on those trips.
TWO WAYS TO DO IT
Everyone plans a real trip in parallel, and the group stays reachable after the last class.
Capped at 8. Seats go to the waiting list first, in the order names came in. Joining the list costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Your schedule, your trip. FAA-loggable ground instruction toward your certificate or flight review, signed.
QUESTIONS, ANSWERED
Certificated VFR pilots who want real confidence on longer cross-countries. If you've got your PPL and you're comfortable in the pattern but longer trips still feel like a stretch, this is for you. No minimum hours, no specific airplane required.
If you're near the finish line of your PPL, you're welcome to join. Just keep your CFI's syllabus front and center until you've met your basic cross-country requirements. The Long Way picks up after that, building confidence for the longer trips you'll want to fly once the certificate's in your pocket. Prefer to finish first and join a later cohort? That works too.
Go the long way.
No cohort on the calendar yet. Get on the list and you'll hear first, or start 1:1 on your own schedule.
JOIN THE WAITING LIST