We would like to land now!

Today's flight was supposed to be a no hassle flight from Bay Bridge to Cambridge and back. Instead it turned out only reasonably well. Because I was taking the Sierra, I had asked the last instructor to refrain from fueling the plane because I was carrying a passenger and didn't want to be over gross weight. It didn't look like that flight had occurred. The last flight appeared to have put gas in the tanks. I solved the problem partially by flying the pattern to burn some fuel.


After that I boarded my passenger and we headed for Cambridge. The flight there was very scenic and after we landed we went into the airport restaurant, Kay's. Things went downhill from there. It took us more than a half hour to get two cups of soup to eat. Once we were done, it was a quick departure and a charge to get back to Bay Bridge before it got dark. We managed to get there and land before it was officially night but it had gotten dark. There were two different aircraft in the pattern with at least one of them a Cessna 172. There was also a departure. Try as I might I was having a very hard time fitting into the traffic pattern due to timing and the fact that there were two planes at a time doing closed patterns. Despite self announcing my intentions it didn't appear that they wanted to let me into the pattern to land. After some frustrating moments I performed a very steep approach to land and got us down. I usually leave my flights with a much lower stress level than when I started. This was one of the few exceptions. At least I learned some things along the way, like how to scare your passenger...well, I learned more than that.