Complex Flying

Bay Area flying is very complex. ✈️

kk... this isn't me flexing or humblebragging about 360s over the Golden Gate or anything. This is just a write-up on planning. Life planning. Work planning. Work-life-life-work planning. Whatever it is.

Take a look at the attached pics to get a sense of the planning involved. Pic 1's colorful lines is the spaghetti overlay of San Francisco, Oakland, San Carlos, Hayward, Palo Alto, Moffett, and San Jose airspaces -- to name a few in this short 40-mile stretch.

The most important part of flying happens well before the wheels ever leave the ground. (Like, way, way before.) You spend hours (sometimes days) checking weather, plotting routes, planning radio comms, playing out what-ifs, and prepping for the slight chance of emergencies.

Here in the Bay Area, take the classic 'Bay Tour' loop. There are many routes, but this is my fav.

Starts at Palo Alto (KPAO, my home airfield!), follows highway 101 past SFO (small airport, nbd), overhead San Francisco, loops the Golden Gate Bridge, cuts over Alcatraz, over to Oakland (KOAK), and then back to Palo Alto over the bay.

Total flight time is around an hour.

Views are fantastic. 📷 🌉

One smooth hour with beauty views for passengers, but a full hour of full-on multitasking, vigilance, and many radio changes and calls for the pilot.

And yet, it feels effortless.

Because the work already happened. The flight's been stress-tested. It's been mentally flown like 10 times before even touching the flight controls. It takes a ton of planning for things to go right and for cases when they don't.

Circling back to work or life: Planning is super important to successful outcomes. This doesn't mean that planning = perfect outcomes.

Planning helps to achieve the most desired outcome, but reduces the ensuing surprise of an unexpected outcome -- you've already thought of what you'd like to do.

There's a pilot saying that I love: “Stay ahead of the airplane. Never let an airplane take you somewhere your brain didn't arrive five minutes earlier.”

Whether you’re flying over San Francisco, building a product, or juggling the many things in your personal life -- the better your plan, the smoother (and less stressful) the ride. 🌴