Flight Crew Private
Flight Crew Last 90 Days 30; Flight Crew Total 90
Training / Qualification; Confusion; Situational Awareness
Airspace Violation All Types; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural FAR; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy
General None Reported / Taken
Airspace Structure; Environment - Non Weather Related; Human Factors; Manuals; Procedure; Chart Or Publication
I'm a fresh private pilot and needed to log some cross country hours before starting my instrument rating. The airspace was a little complicated; did my homework and decided go follow a VFR Flight Rules Route. Also I made a post on our facebook page and asked if there's an experienced pilot that would like to be my passenger and may be helpful in case of need. Someone was interested and said he has a license and XXX hours; flying for X years; so I was happy to take him with me since he has such kind experience.I took off from my home airport with flight following and made it to special flight rules area; everything was smooth; and landed at the airport. There was a little errand I need to take care of; my pilot friend joined me and I wanted open route conversation for the way back; mentioned we need to stay under 3;000 ft. before we get under Class B airspace. His response was no you will talk to clearance delivery so we don't need to; they're going to give us squawk code etc. I was confused with his answer and before we got into the airplane I brought this topic up again. His response was the same. I thought he knew something that I don't know since he has so many hours but his attitude was super confident and seemed like he didn't want to talk about it further. We called clearance delivery got the squawk code and took off. I stopped climbing and maintained 3;500 ft. when we got under Class B airspace so probably our altitude was around 3;300 ft. while we were still in Class C airspace even though it was just several seconds. My experienced pilot license owner 'friend' who has X times more total hours than me was so confident that we didn't do anything wrong. The rest of the flight was smooth. Initiated the flight following after Special Flight rules area and landed at my home airport with no issues and went home started to dig around to find something about this and couldn't feel comfortable by what I found. I called my previous Instructor and asked him. I was right; what we did there was totally wrong. We should have been under 3;000 ft. if we're not talking with approach at that moment.I called the experienced pilot who traveled with me; he denied again until I saw him in person and showed him what we did on the app. He accepted eventually that he was wrong. He didn't understand I was talking about this when I tried to discuss etc. What I learned from this is whoever it is; it doesn't matter. I am the pilot in command and unless I am 100% convinced not going to proceed further; do my homework better; be 100% sure about everything on the route before flying even if there's someone next to me with professionally logged XX;000 hours.
A General Aviation pilot reported an airspace violation.