Alla's first trip
My other life is as a development architect at IBM
here in Northern California. One of the more interesting
people that I know at IBM is a young lady - Alla. Alls is a
project manager who claimed to be deathly afraid of flying, but was
more than willing to take a ride in my 172SP. I couldn't wait
to see!
I picked Alla up at the
Ried
Hillview airport in San Jose California. I had just
finished giving another friend an intro flight and was truly looking
forward to the challenges which is flying with a passenger who
doesn't want to go flying.
I told Alla, to her disbelief, that she was going to
fly the plane this day, takeoff and en-route. I don't think
she really believed it until I asked her to push full power on the
throttle as we were lined up on runway 31R at
Ried
Hillview
Takeoff
I don't think I've ever hear anybody whimper while
they were piloting a plane, but during takeoff, I heard that for the
first time. Not only did Alla take off OK, but she did a great
job when the nose was too low or too high. She knew exactly
how to follow my instructions and not once did I have to take the
wheel from her because of bad piloting.
Alla doesn't look too excited here during takeoff,
but that was soon to change.
En-route
During our trip, Alla's nervousness was evident, but
was quickly being overcome with awe as to how easy it was to pilot a
small airplane. About the time we got to
Livermore municipal airport, Alla was amazed as to how easy the
plane was to fly. So, to make this impression even stronger, I
temporarily took over the controls. 'What are you going to
do?' came straight out of her mouth. You see, Alla felt that
if the engine of a small plane were to stop during flight, the plane
will plummet immediately down to the ground. I wanted to
change that impression.
 So,
to make a long story short, I pulled the power, trimmed the plane
for best glide speed (around 67 knots) and we hung in the air at
5,500 feet descending at only 300 feet per minute. "That means
we'll be up here for almost 20 minutes without the engine running!".
A lot of time to figure out what we have to do. After loosing
about 500 feet, Alla added full power to climb back up to altitude
and continue our journey.
I noticed something about Alla's face almost
immediately after I gave her the engine-out demonstration. It
had changed from concern and fear to one of total fun! She
couldn't believe how easy, safe and fun it was to fly around the San
Francisco bay area in a small general aviation aircraft.
 After
some more flying, and a discussion of looking for traffic in the
area, we began to get closer to the golden gate bridge and San
Francisco.
The golden gate bridge was beautiful on that Friday
afternoon. The advection fog was rolling in off of the coast
and was just covering about 1/2 of the gate. Flying north of
and near the bridge was quite the site with Sausalito just to our
right.
 San
Francisco was beautiful as well with the fog beginning to roll into
the city in preparation for sunset. San Francisco is even more
beautiful from a small plane after the sun has set and the city
lights are ablaze. It is even legal to fly very close to and
above the buildings of San Francisco as long as you stay out of the
Class B and C airspace.
I thought it would be fun to fly out to Pt. Reyes
lighthouse, but the fog pretty much killed that idea, so we decided
to fly around Mt. 'Tam' and then back to San Jose.
Our route took us near the golden gate bridge, then
around to Mt. 'Tam', then back towards San Jose. Alla had
never seen Monterey from the air, so we decided to land back at
Livermore municipal airport to fuel up, then, head towards
Monterey.
The Livermore valley was a little misty the day of
the flight, but it was clear enough to see the airport from 10 miles
away.
We started towards San Jose, but realized that the
fog was moving in pretty much as it was near the golden gate bridge.
Monterey didn't look like it was going to happen during this flight.
So, we headed towards Mt. Hamilton, the home of the
Lick
Observatory. This set of telescopes have recently been
involved in the search for extra-solar planets and contains one of
the largest (if not the largest) refracting telescopes ever built.
A trip to the Lick observatory takes about 45 minutes in a car
leaving from San Jose up a very winding road - it's well worth the
trip however if you love Astronomy and science as much as I do.
Mt Hamilton and the observatories (small white
circles)
Alla, for some reason, didn't want to land the plane
back at
Ried Hillview, so I took over the reins at that point.
This was not the same young lady I had gotten in the
plane with earlier in the day. I don't think I've ever seen a
bigger smile on someone's face after we landed and I was even asked
when we could do it again.
We had a great time and this kind of bay tour is
really a lot of fun. We were in the air for about 2 hours and
were able to see many beautiful areas of the bay without every
moving into class Bravo or Charlie airspace - it was a really fun
trip and elliminated the fear that Alla had of flying in small
planes - they want to fly!
This page was last modified on
12/03/2006
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