Boy's Flight

Last Thursday the sky cleared, it was spring break, and my wife was out town and was holding down the home front with the boys. Time to go flying!

A quick check of the Ahart online schedule and we were off to the airport.

Flying with my sons highlights two reasons for avoiding the pitfalls of sloppy pilot ness. One, it's my job to keep them safe. Two, I want to set a good example.

For this flight both items are checked. I've been able to include my oldest on more of the preflight duties and he takes special pride in the fuel drain duties.

I opted to fly the SP instead of the 182. I like to use the 182 just to keep sharp in it, but with the extra duty of two kids, I figured I’ll just go with the easy bird.

Once we were strapped in and ready to go, no easy feat with one car seat and a booster(Hey aircraft manufacturers, how about adding latch to your seats?), we taxied to the end of 25 right. My youngest was all good to go and smiles to this point so we were go for stage two.

We would start off with an initial short flight from LVK to over fly our house and my oldest son’s school. This would give us the ability to turn back quickly if things went bad with the little guy and give him a good point of reference. I used the line, 'See we’re the plane above out house today!'

Side note on that topic; each time I've been over my house at the appropriate altitude I realize that some of the pilots the over fly our house and really low. Now if you’re the P-51 that buzzed the house I'm all up for that, but the rest of you....

Anyway, things went well so we continued on (little guy opted for nap time shortly after the home over flight) and made out way to Half Moon Bay. A run on the beach, some dinner and a brownie for desert and we headed back.

I switched the little guy to the back and my older son assumed co-pilots duty. I take some perverse amusement that even with all the so called security measures in place a six year was at the controls just over the Golden Gate Bridge.(yes, yes I was still really doing the flying, but chalk it up to video games, he holds a great level course already)

A low pass over the moth ball fleet and a direct over flight of Mt Diablo capped off a great evening.

Doesn't get much better than that, I'm advertising our next adventure as a flight to Columbia.