8/3/2002
Jeff - CFI checking my WX brief etc
C-172 99348
Hobbs: 1.2 hours
1.2 PIC :)
Arrived at the flight club @ 5pm
WX brief + chat - left for Kaiser at about 5:25
Preflight + chill-out-few-minutes before starting up until 6pm
Started, ATIS, Contact Ground, Taxiid to East Runup area - thankfully, following 1658F as they told us to go down Bravo taxiway (for traffic) & I didn't know how to go that way.
Cleared 27L takeoff - 6:15pm - lights, camera, action! off and running. Maintained 310 degrees at 1800' (at or below 2000) until handoff to bay departure.
Went out to SP bay for some great slow flight, decent steep turns (could use some work), good power-off stalls, and some not-great power-on stalls.
The first two power-on stalls were crappy (mainly directional stability). The third one (after doing other maneuvers) went ok.
Whoo! - what a view today!
The bay area was awesome - there was light traffic up there, and I was always scanning outside. Saw a few nearby and heard all of their calls to/from bay departure and approach.
Now - the hairy stuff:
1. first call to bay approach - no response, tried 5 times
2. tried second Com - response on the first try - used this until handoff to OAK tower
3. used second Com for OAK tower - OK, until...
4. contacted ground on "point niner" and got no response 3 times.
5. went back to first Com for OAK ground (but put in bay freq by mistake) and got told of wrong freq + correct freq
6. dialed the '0' to a '1' for 121.9 and called ground which quickly cleared me to taxi to Kaiser.
7. Was asked 1-2 times by ground to expedite w/o delay past 33 due to inbound traffic.
Back in time 4 minutes - and on the way in, I could tell tower was busy. There were people before and after me. I was planning on asking for the back taxi, but had heard tower
instruct 2 planes in a row to land long. I asked 'should 348 land long' and they said yes etc... Having only done one long landing before with Khaled, I was confident that I wouldn't
land beyond a safe point, but didn't know what the last safe point was! so I made a *very* conservative choice and landed probably 3500' down the 6000' runway (to me, this was long).
To tower, it apparently was *not* nearly as long as they would have liked. Oh well - they were miffed, 'expedite taxi to Juliet..." blah once or twice.
Not to mention during this, that they asked me to turn base right as I was already starting to (but they can't see it on radar) and were clearly rushing things in.
Lessons learned:
Nothing unsafe happened, but I like to be cautious and curtious. Perhaps in the future if I hear a busy tower (and am not much more polished than today) I'll mention: student pilot etc before the time to turn on base.
