Cross-country journey in a custom open-cockpit homebuilt (N149X). 9,722 nm planned, all four corners of the U.S., spread across six flying weeks.
✓ Complete — home at Oceanside, 7 September 2026. All five segments flown: 101 legs, roughly 8,465 nm and 147 hours airborne between 14 April and 7 September 2026. Every segment's GPS track is published below.
View planned route on SkyVector
| ✓ Segment 1 | KOKB → KBRO | April 14-18, 2026 | 12 legs, ~1,360 nm |
| ✓ Segment 2 | KBRO → KCGC (Gulf Coast eastbound) | June 5-13, 2026 | 19 legs, ~1,600 nm |
| ✓ Segment 3 | KCGC → KGTF | July 2-24, 2026 | 47 legs, ~3,700 nm |
| ✓ Segment 4 | KGTF → KYKM | August 20-24, 2026 | 9 legs, ~535 nm |
| ✓ Segment 5 | KYKM → KOKB (the Pacific coast and home) | September 4-7, 2026 | 14 legs, ~1,230 nm |
101 legs and roughly 8,465 nm flown, in about 147 hours airborne. The route wandered from the original plan — Segment 2 turned east along the Gulf instead of returning to Oceanside, and Segment 3 ran up the Atlantic seaboard to Maine before heading west. Segment 3 also absorbed what was originally planned as two separate segments, so the trip finished at Segment 5 rather than Segment 6.
Five flying days, twelve legs, southbound border run from Oceanside, CA to Brownsville, TX:
Trip totals: ~22.5 hours airborne, three video cameras (left wing, right wing, forward "Eye of God"), live-streamed via Starlink to @PaulBreed on YouTube.
Download the actual GPS track: Segment1_Trip.kml — opens in Google Earth, shows the flown path of all 12 legs with altitude profile and airport markers. ~1.8 MB.
Brownsville east along the Gulf coast to Florida, then a loop down the peninsula and back. Seven flying days, nineteen legs:
~30 hours airborne. The KRAS → KTFP hop was flown but not filmed.
Departure had been held for Starship — the plan was to time the trip around the next Boca Chica launch window and overfly Starbase on the way out. In the event the outbound track passed about 6 nm north of the pad at 1,250 ft, 17 minutes after leaving Brownsville. The route as planned is still on SkyVector — compare it with the KML below to see where the trip actually went.
Download the actual GPS track: Segment2_Trip.kml — 19 legs coloured by day, with airport markers. ~2.9 MB.
The long one: Florida to Montana the scenic way, up the Atlantic seaboard to the Canadian border, west across the Great Lakes to Oshkosh, then out across the northern plains. Sixteen flying days, forty-seven legs, ~63 hours airborne.
Three flights on this segment were flown but not filmed — two overnight repositions, and the short hop from Walhalla to Cavalier, North Dakota after Walhalla turned out to have no fuel.
Download the actual GPS track: Segment3_Trip.kml — 47 legs coloured by day, with airport markers. ~6.1 MB.
A short one: Great Falls, Montana west across the Rockies to Yakima, Washington. Four flying days, nine legs, ~11.5 hours airborne.
The gap on the 21st is an alternator charging problem, diagnosed on the ground at Lincoln. The nine-minute flight from Lincoln back to Lincoln on the 20th is the test hop that found it.
Download the actual GPS track: Segment4_Trip.kml — 9 legs coloured by day, with airport markers. ~1.1 MB.
The last one: Yakima, Washington to Oceanside, California, almost entirely down the coast. Four flying days, fourteen flights, thirteen airports, ~19.9 hours airborne.
The stop at Oceano wasn't planned. Chan's cousins turned up to meet him there, which he wasn't expecting, so two rides went out of L52 before the aircraft carried on to Santa Paula. Both are in the track.
Download the actual GPS track: Segment5_Trip.kml — 14 legs coloured by day, with airport markers. ~2.0 MB.
Segments 2 through 5 were reconstructed from the wing-camera GPS telemetry rather than a filed flight plan — every landing resolves to a real airport. For Segments 2 and 3 the timings also agree with the ADS-B record to a minute or two. Segment 4 had something better: a route known in advance. Derived blind from the cameras, it recovered all nine legs and all nine airports in order, every endpoint within 0.8 nm. Segment 5 went one better and found something the route notes didn't have — the unplanned Oceano stop and both rides out of it. One leg needed help: on 4S2 → KSPB the right camera was the only source and its GPS froze for 142 seconds mid-flight, ending about 2.3 nm adrift before it caught up. That leg carries a second line alongside the camera track, drawn thin and dashed and labelled [overlay], taken from the Garmin aboard the aircraft. The Garmin also catches the departure from Hood River five minutes before the camera started recording. Its agreement everywhere else is the reassuring part: across Segments 4 and 5 the two sources sit a median of 15 metres apart, and on Segment 4 not one point differs by more than a tenth of a mile. The camera's own track is left in place beside it — replacing it would hide the evidence that the camera failed.
Nothing is committed and nothing is scheduled. But there is a line drawn on a chart: follow the rivers — the Missouri to the ocean, with a side jaunt up the Ohio to pick up West Virginia, and a trip home through Oklahoma.
West to east across the desert Southwest — Parker, Bullhead City, Boulder City, Page — then up through Moab, Grand Junction, Vernal and Riverton into Montana. From Laurel the route runs the Yellowstone to Miles City, Glendive and Fairview, and at Williston picks up the Missouri: Garrison, Linton, Pierre, Wagner, Yankton, Sioux City, Council Bluffs, Nebraska City, St. Joseph, Grain Valley, Washington, and on to the confluence above St. Louis.
Then the Mississippi — but not straight down it. The line turns up the Ohio first, past Paducah, Louisville, Madison and Portsmouth to Huntington, West Virginia, before turning back to Cairo and running the Mississippi the rest of the way: Cape Girardeau, Memphis, Helena, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and out at Lakefront in New Orleans. Home is the long way west through Shawnee, Oklahoma, Albuquerque, Gallup, Flagstaff, Sedona, Scottsdale and Blythe.
View the 2027 idea on SkyVector — 35 airports, about 6,070 statute miles, and 25 states crossed. If 2026 was the outline of the country, this one traces what drains through the middle of it.
Between them, the two trips would have the Breezy lay eyes on all 48 continental states — 47 of them from directly overhead. The forty-eighth is Delaware, and it was no distant view: Segment 3 flew the length of its Atlantic shore — Fenwick, Indian River, Rehoboth — mostly inside a mile of the beach and, at the closest, six hundred feet off it. From an open cockpit at that range, Delaware counts.
Per-leg ride-along videos and a full trip timelapse (~22.5 hr compressed to ~13-18 min) are published in the playlists as they're edited.
Contact: paulsphone.urocket@gmail.com