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パイロット夫妻のカリフォルニア生活 Napa Couple Flying High Flying in Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area has always been a very popular place for general aviation pilots and sight seeing flights for tourists. Every day we are always reminded by its beauty why people always come back to see what we see. We have seen so many golden sunsets over the Golden Gate Bridge and beautiful lights at night of the cities that we always stop to appreciate how fortunate we are to work and live in a place like this.
We are experts now at flying in this busy airspace. It is the fifth busiest in the world. We learned how to fly in this area and the training was very tough. The training required our full dedication and constant perfection in performance to be not just safe, but to be skilled pilots. We were working so hard in training and felt like 24 hours in a day was never enough. But we always tried to find some free time and an available airplane to rent for the day. We would fly to airports all over the state of California to eat at restaurants close to the airport. Hamburgers at one place, steaks at another; we could go to places most people couldn’t. The best part was on the way back from the dinner, we would fly over the beautifully lighted downtown San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. We could have the airplane as long as we wanted and did a lot of sight seeing by air and took a lot of pictures. Eventually, we learned to fly all over the Bay Area and the state like most people know their own neighborhood. We had no problem navigating the land and the complex airspace.
Flying in Bay Area means dealing with morning and evening fog in the summer and fall. The warm water in the Pacific Ocean gets rapidly cooled by cold Alaskan water, runs through the California coastline, get pushed into bay area cities and valleys. It is mystic and peaceful sight even just by driving. We can smell the ocean and green grass at once. When flying into and through the fog, it creates some technical challenges to pilots and we are required to hold an instrument rating on our pilot license. This is a must rating to have, to get full experience of bay area flying. It is so special when we see the view of just the top part of two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge or the downtown skyscrapers peaking through pure white layer of fog, so bright red by the sunshine reflecting on white foggy blanket. It is a breathtaking moment for anybody to see for the first time and one never gets used to it every time you see it. That fog often moves into Napa valley when weak wind blows from the west and it covers the rolling hills of vineyards.
Not only we enjoy the great views of flying every day but also we go hiking to many beautiful sites all over California. And also going wine tasting is an amazing treat for living here, in Napa.
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