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!

1 thought 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!

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