Flying Over the Golden Gate Bridge (they still let you do that?)

My niece Hannah and fiancée Matt were (actually did) going to get married in Hawaii, but since not everyone could get out to the islands they had a get together in Half Moon Bay. I flew in and had a great time with family and I offered the couple a flight.

Where to go?

The bay area, as you can imagine, is a serious maze of different airspaces and with SFO actually pretty close to the city you need to be extremely careful if you don’t want to scare the bejesus out of a Boeing 787 full of passengers and lose your license for life.

The key is to fly low. No, not under the radar, but under the path of the jets that fly above. The protected airspaces are generally above 1,000 feet (along the coast) so you can stay there or below along the San Francisco coast for a fine tour, then you are allowed and in fact need to get a little higher when above the Golden Gate Bridge. FAA regulations that you have to be 500 feet from a building or person, but that is pretty close and I didn’t want to make anyone nervous so I was about 1,000 feet above the bridge.

The flight was fantastic!

2 thoughts on “Flying Over the Golden Gate Bridge (they still let you do that?)

  1. Nice! They let us fly through SFO Bravo quite easily. They even have a name for it: the Bay Tour. Which ATC encodes on their flight strip as “2UR”. It’s typically a flight from the south, for example from RHV. Transition through Class Charlie midfield over SJC. Fly through SFO Bravo abeam the airport. And they terminate Flight Following just before the Golden Gate Bridge. And a little buzzing over Alcatraz. Quite a sight! Glad you could enjoy it!

  2. This is good to know, and thanks for sharing these pictures…they are looking lovely, I hope I could get a chance to fly over it after completing my flying training for flight school. Thanks for sharing this journey with us.. This resource…..i came across recently and is nice too as this particular site.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close