San Francisco Bay Tour

Wow! What a great flight! I am so glad that Andy suggested we do it. After a short drive up highway 101 to the flying club (Diamond Aviation) we took off from the San Carlos airport which is just south of San Francisco and flew past SFO and then over San Fransciso. We saw all the sites you would expect to see - the tall skyscrapers (none of which I can remember the name), Alcatraz (aka The Rock), and the Golden Gate Bridge (as well as the Bay Bridge and that other bridge).

Andy was kind enough to let me do the flying, since he had done the tour twice previously. We were fortunate enough to get a glass cockpit 172 with the Garmin G-1000. Talk about a sweet ride! This thing was nicer inside than most cars I've been in - leather seats and all! The flying went ok - after I stopped fixing on the beautiful colour display. The headset I had was crap though - I couldn't really hear the controllers. That was fine since the instructor we brought along was handling the radios but it would have been nice to hear everything. Oh well. Anyways, as I was saying the flying went ok up until we were coming back to land at San Carlos. We crossed over the runway at circuit altitude (and just as an aside - they call it the pattern in the states, not the circuit) and then I was told to turn downwind. In my opinion I thought it was a bit soon to turn downwind (too close to the runway) but since I was the new guy and he was the instructor I listened to him. Then there was a plane and a helicopter in front of us so I had to make it a long downwind leg. After turning base it was pretty apparent that I had better turn final immediately or I wasn't going to be even remotely close to the approach path I needed. After turning final, we were off to the left by quite a bit but I managed to correct that. Landing was ok, although I think I should have flared a bit higher. It was kind of a crappy ending to such a great flight, but oh well, I'm not going to dwell on it. I still think if he had just let me fly the circuit without telling me when to turn downwind / base / final it would have turned out better, but I guess we'll never know. :)

Thankfully, Andy used my camera to take all sort of pictures and they are all on Flickr naturally - here actually.