Glory Days

Adam Kwasnicki and Sean Samuel

One of the hightlights of the Airline and Flight Operations program is the Cross-country tour.  This endeavour challenges pairs of students to apply their skills and knowledge to real situations in unfamiliar territory.  The team of Sean Samuel and Adam Kwasnicki chose to challenge themselves with a trip to San Francisco, and Las Vegas. 

The team has allowed us to share their cross-country experiences through Sean's account, whcih will be posted over the next three days. 

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The Glory Days Aren’t Over Yet! (Part 1)

by Sean Samuel

It was a bright and sunny Saturday morning at 7am when fellow pilot Adam Kwasnicki and I, two of BCIT’s finest students from Class 10 hopped in our Cessna 172P. We were embarking on our longest cross country flight to date: from Boundary Bay to San Francisco, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City and return in seven days.

We started the journey by flying across the border to Bellingham International to clear customs with the U.S. Border Services. The border guards were very friendly and welcoming to us, only taking a few minutes to go through our passports before wishing us a safe trip. Finally, we could really get our journey started.



I flew the first leg from Bellingham, south along the Puget Sound past the slowly awakening city of Seattle and then due west toward the Pacific. Only an hour into the leg and we could see the ocean in all its vastness and to add to the beauty; the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and not a cloud to be seen. We proceeded down the coast stopping first in Newport, Oregon for fuel and then again in Garberville, California, a small town about 15 miles inland and only 200 miles from San Francisco! Garberville airport posed some interesting challenges as it was in a valley surrounded by tall hills and it was extremely hot, which reduced the aircraft’s performance. Nevertheless, Adam (who flew into Garberville) skillfully landed the aircraft and taxied us over to the fuel pumps. We had a 15- minute turn around for fuel as neither of us wanted to spend much time on the ground as the temperature was into the high thirties.





Shelter Cove



We then departed back to the shoreline where we had planned to stop over for lunch at a small aerodrome called Shelter Cove. The pictures of this beautiful shoreline runway had left us looking forward to having lunch there for the past two weeks. As we climbed the last ridge and saw the Pacific once more we expected to see the beautiful blue ocean, but we were greeted with a rather different view. A blanket of cloud 500’ high was covering the entire coast of California and out over the ocean. Right away our hopes of visiting Shelter Cove Airport were dashed as we couldn’t even see the coastline let alone a runway.

As pilots, we of course had planned for such an occurrence, and soon enough Adam (who was co-piloting the leg) pulled out our alternate routing to take us direct to our overnight destination of San Francisco. He relayed to me the headings to fly and two hours later we found ourselves overlooking the San Francisco Bay Area.



Adam and I had hoped to do a tour of the Golden Gate Bridge from the air; unfortunately the cloud from Shelter Cove was still hugging the coast including the bridge to the extent that we couldn’t even see it! Nevertheless we had work to do, we were flying over an unfamiliar city, in some of the world’s busiest airspace, and it had been over 10 hours since we had awoken that morning. I advised ATC that we were unfamiliar with the airspace, and they graciously vectored us along a few lakes and onto a highway going right to the airport. (I do have to say, their highways made our Trans-Canada Highway look like a mere side road.)

Once in sight of the airport, I was handed over from terminal to Hayward Executive Airport tower control and they cleared me in to land on runway two-eight right. The landing was typical, no gusts of wind or turbulence to push me off course. As we taxied off the runway and over to the parking area we were greeted by one of the airport operators who welcomed us to San Francisco. We were then treated to the VIP experience which is common to many US airports, but almost unheard of at our Canadian counterparts. They helped carry our bags to a golf cart and drove us into the terminal. We paid for the overnight parking and fuelling, and were then driven to the hotel for no extra cost!

We walked into our hotel room, dropped our bags and then realized… we were in San Francisco!!! The next day would be spent touring San Francisco, walking from the east side of the city to the western shore where the Golden Gate Bridge lay, stopping along the way whenever we saw something interesting….

My next article will be of the third day of our trip when Adam and I flew the six hour leg to Las Vegas!

Our view on the walk up to the Golden Gate Bridge