A flying update

I’ve been into aviation for basically as far as I can remember. As a kid (and still today), one of my favorite pastimes besides actually traveling on an airplane, was to head to the local airport and plane-watch/plane-spot. Occasionally, these were spontaneous trips, hoping for enough traffic to see quite a few planes, and most other times, they involved me taking a look at the airport’s activity on FlightAware the day before, checking out all the interesting aircraft on the schedule for the next day. I grew up in the SF Bay Area, and frequented SJC and SFO for these adventures. It wasn’t until 2017 that I realized I could actually fly myself!

I started training at RHV that summer, and continued at the local flight club at ITH where I went to school, finishing off after weather smoke related delays back at RHV the next summer. The entire time I was training, I dreamed of the day I’d be able to fly myself across the country, fly to cool $100 hamburger¹ spots, or fly to some new state just for the hell of it.

After I received my rating, the first flight I did was a quick bay tour², a classic, locally known route flying over Silicon Valley (the  Spaceship is truly huge), up the Peninsula and the Sunset, around the Golden Gate and Marin, circling over FiDi, and finally transitioning either east over to Berkeley and Oakland, or heading back down south to return to RHV. It’s a flight that since then, I’ve probably flown a few dozen times, each with great views. The views don’t get old, but after awhile of mixing in fun, local flights with friends with instrument training, I thought back to my dreams of flying further and exploring.

I’ve planned a few flights, but never ended up flying them—either money, time, or weather got in the way (I never wanted to be that guy that got stranded somewhere because the clouds rolled in). Finally, in 2020, I decided that I wanted to finally start taking those flights, and then COVID hit, eliminating the fun of flying somewhere to catch up with friends since travel became (and still is) strongly discouraged (and certainly not made easier given NY state’s quarantine law). I flew just 10 hours over the summer for currency’s sake, with very few leisure flights or even bay tours. So now, after finishing up my first-ever BFR³, I’ve realized that I’ve never really explored the destinations available around Upstate NY. With less than 4 months left here, I’ve decided that (weather permitting) I’m going to explore as much as possible by air.

[1] See $100 hamburger.

[2] See tracklog.

[3] Biennial Flight Review