First Tsao Family Flight

Today I flew with my first passengers: my family! Mary, Emily, and Thomas willingly or unknowingly got in N54JA, a Cessna 172SP, and we attempted to fly from SQL (San Carlos Airport) to HAF (Half Moon Bay Airport).

I picked 54JA among the other available planes because it was near the Gazebo, which is a little raised platform at SQL with picnic benches. It's a great place to leave the kids during preflight. I did my normal preflight and then added booster seats into the back row of the airplane and plugged in everyone's headsets. We packed everyone in, and we were off!

I stayed in the pattern once in case anyone freaked out, and then we departed Runway 30 toward VPCRY. As we passed the mountain peaks, we began hitting a little turbulence. I self-announced on HAF's CTAF as we overflew the airport at 2,500, then we began a 180 over the ocean to do the official 1,000-feet-above-pattern-altitude overflight. At this point I noticed people were entering 30's pattern by coming in well north of the airport (versus overflying and then looping left onto the 45), so I turned left, followed their pattern, and began descending to TPA. The mountain turbulence was really starting to bug Mary, but I pressed on a couple miles behind a Cherokee.

As I turned onto base, I decided to call it off; it was just too gusty for an enjoyable landing. I could have easily made a safe landing, but I knew that even with my limited experience my idea of "safe" was well outside my passengers' idea of "safe and comfortable." So I self-announced that I was aborting the landing and departing the pattern on 30's base leg, and we climbed to 2,500 and headed back home to SQL.

The flight was 0.7 hours on the Hobbs with less than half an hour in the air. When the turbulence began the kids fell asleep (their usual defense mechanism). As they got out of the plane back at San Carlos they claimed to have had fun.

I'm glad to have gotten my first flight with passengers out of the way; part of me had imagined doing hundreds more hours of pattern work before taking any passengers, but once I finally got my license, my confidence level was high enough that I wanted to take the whole family right out of the gate. That said, it's a heck of a lot of work to fly to HAF with two toddlers for ice cream. Next time I'd like to go somewhere interesting or do something fun, so that the 30 minutes of preflight and 15 minutes of post-flight cleanup are worth it.

Mary will probably be posting pictures soon.