It took some time but the day has come to take a Cessna up for a spin ... "solo"!. I'm signed off by the club's instructor, got the US paperwork done and got my access-badge for the Oakland airport. A flight-report follows (on the left) and you can see the route of flight on the right.

So here I am at the Alameda Aero Club - unlike in the Ottawa Flying Club the pilot has to do a lot of paperwork and organizational himself:

After a thorough walkaround I'm taking of from runway 27R and head towards Oakland downtown. From there slight-left places me over the Oakland bridge and from there I'm flying along San Francisco's bayside (pier after pier).

Eventually the Golden Gate Bridge comes into sight but because of the clouds I'm keeping a little bit of a distance.

I'm staying on the bay side north of the gate - Sausalito:

A quick glance down - yes the cockpit is where it belongs :)

There's not much to report from San Pablo Bay - the north extension to San Francisco Bay. I'm simply circling the whole thing which takes approximately 20 minutes. Then I'm heading back towards Richmond where the radio-chatter begins anew:

The landmark of choice here is the Mormon Temple. An ugly thing easy to spot from a VFR aircraft. Then I join the pattern for 27R and I'm back on the ground.

The dirty duties of a pilot - refill the plane and then park and lock it down.

In case you still haven't seen enough please listen in on the "blackbox tape" that I've kept running. I cut it in a way that only my active conversations are captured so it's just about 5 minutes long (a decent mp3 player is required - realplayer on my box for example doesn't perform very well with this one - Windows Media Player though works fine)