Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we often have our best weather in the fall – September and October in particular. That’s after the summer fog is mostly gone and temperatures warm up – especially if there’s a high pressure area inland that causes warm offshore winds that push higher temperatures into the Bay.
The downside is those winds and higher temperatures are also what bring with them the greatly elevated risks of wildfires – with most of the worst files in California occuring in these fall months.
This year it feels like we may escape some of those wildfire risks following the first real rainfall of the season which arrived on Tuesday with an offshore low pressure system gradually moving down the coast from Oregon to Southern California. As it moved, it picked up moisture from the Pacific Ocean and dumped it onshore – in particular, Southern California seemed to get the worst of it. With the rain came much colder temperatures – the first time I’ve needed to wear my heavier coat with a hood this fall.
With that weather system now moving across the rest of the U.S., we’re looking at a week or ten days of nicer fall weather with daytime temperatures mostly in the 70’s and overnight lows in the low 50’s – just about ideal for this time or year.
Let’s hope this week’s rain put an end to the risk of wildfires this year – but it may be too early to count on the just yet.
Suddenly, I was enveloped in a thick, impenetrable fog. One moment, I had been cruising through clear skies; the next, I was relying solely on my instruments to make an instrument approach into Salinas. The transition was abrupt, and my heart raced as I scanned the gauges in front of me.
“Scan and scan again,” my flight instructor’s voice echoed in my mind, a mantra drilled into me during the long hours of instrument flight training. I forced my eyes to move, to keep scanning, but they kept drifting back to the directional gyro — suddenly its compass rose was spinning wildly, round and round, sort of hypnotizing me, capturing my focus. My gaze felt stuck, refusing to budge as the gyro whirled around and around, 360 degrees of chaos. I knew the airplane wasn’t actually turning but I was very confused.
“Focus, focus!” I yelled at myself. I wrenched my gaze away from that directional gyro, my heart pounding in my chest. That instrument had become a black hole, threatening to suck all my concentration into its dizzying vortex. I needed to maintain control, and not let things get away from me. I needed to stay “in front” of the airplane, not “fall behind”.
Pilots in the clouds must keep scanning across four primary flight instruments — or risk being seduced by their inner ears into believing they’re in a turn and need to correct. Instead, the correction puts the airplane into a turn, and a deadly spiral begins. I knew this, but the malfunctioning gyro made it hard to trust my instruments.
I forced my gaze to the attitude indicator, my eyes locking onto the horizon line. The wings were level — good. But I needed more confirmation. The altimeter showed a descending altitude flying the glide slope; the airspeed indicator reassured me I wasn’t descending abnormally. Finally, I checked the turn coordinator — no turn, the wings still level.
I resumed my scan, fighting the urge to glance back at the gyro. I pushed the throttle full in for maximum power, broke off the glideslope and began to climb. I knew there were clear blue skies above me. The altimeter, airspeed indicator, and attitude indicator became my anchors, each pass feeling like an eternity. My palms were sweaty, my breath coming in shallow, rapid bursts.
The cloud seemed endless, a suffocating blanket threatening to overwhelm me. The instruments became my only reality, their steady readings a tenuous grip on sanity. A voice in my headphones said “You’re not on the glide slope. State your intentions.” I quickly said “Cancelling the approach, equipment problem.” He gave me a new altitude to climb to and a vector away from the airport.
Then, I broke out above the fog layer and into the clear air above, the oppressive gray giving way to blue. The horizon reappeared, a welcome sight after the endless void of the clouds. Slowly, the tension in my muscles began to ease, though the threat of the spinning gyro loomed in the back of my mind. It continued to spin.
As I reflected on the incident later, I realized that my flight instructor’s relentless emphasis on scanning had not only guided me through that moment of crisis but also ingrained a deeper understanding of what it means to be a pilot. It’s not just about flying the plane; it’s about staying composed, making quick decisions, and always being ready for the unexpected. The sky can be very unforgiving, but with training and determination, a pilot can navigate even the most daunting challenges.
In that moment, I felt like I had dodged a bullet — I wasn’t just someone flying a plane, but had faced a serious challenge and been able to safely recover from it. I felt thankful to have escaped the failure, not fallen victim to its mechanical grasp.
The best flights always end with a smooth touchdown back home. I was relieved to taxi back to my parking spot and shut the engine down, looking forward to flying another day. With a new directional gyro installed!
It’s the last day of September and here in northern California we can feel the seasons changing.
We don’t get the brilliant fall colors in the trees here like in New England. Our seasons change more subtlety.
Instead, we tend to notice the little things of seasonal change – like how dark it’s getting to be in the mornings. When we’re used to waking up with the sun already up and daylight outside to this morning where it was dark until almost 7 AM.
Likewise in the evening when the darkness settles in much earlier than we’re used to – and sometime soon we’ll have the startling shift of moving back from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time – giving us back a bit more of our morning light but robbing us even more of our evening light.
We also got a touch of very light rain overnight – the first glimmer of our traditional rainy season which will be here soon enough.
On my morning walk this morning, I noticed the splotches the rain left behind on the pavement. But what I first noticed was the first smells of fall – that smell of musty wet bark on the ground at our local park – a reminder for me of my years growing up in the midwest when the first good snow would fall and I’d notice how incredibly silent it would be outside – cold, crisp, still – and that beautiful silence.
Tomorrow we leave September behind and arrive in October. Fall is here.
Just for fun, I shared the text of this blog post with Claude, the AI chat bot from Anthropic, and asked it to transform it into the style of David Foster Wallace. It’s much more dramatic than my writing!…
Almost October
The last grubby light of September drags itself wearily over the expanse that is northern California, but even this seemingly endless reach of suburbs and strip malls cannot escape the subtle signs announcing autumn’s ingress. We do not, it is true, experience the pyrotechnic explosion of foliage that sets New England ablaze in actinic oranges and cadaverous greens; our vegetation shifts from its summer torpor to its winter slumber far more discreetly.
And yet the evidence accumulates nonetheless: the darkened dawn that delays its arrival until nearly 7 a.m., the premature nightfall that plunges us into gloom while work and school still claim our attention.
Soon enough the yearly sham of Daylight Saving will end, returning some of the stolen sunlight to our mornings yet robbing even more from our evenings.
A damp breeze scuttles in, bearing advance notice of the imminent rainy season, and leaves behind scattered dark splashes on the pavement.
On my quotidian constitutional this morning, I detected more signs of autumn’s advent: the fungal reek of wet bark in the local park conjured sense-memories of Midwestern childhood, of the first snow’s hushed and glorious descent, the implacable cold, the crystalline perfection of utter silence.
September expires today; October arrives tomorrow. Autumn makes its presence known, however quietly. The year winds down.
We’ve had one rough winter in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not rough in the sense that many have living in much more extreme winter conditions. But rough for us.
It seems like we’ve been waiting and waiting for spring to arrive and every time we thought it might be around the corner we took another jag into either an atmospheric river bringing heavy rains and wind from Hawaii to a spin-off low making its way down from Alaska bringing more cold air.
Then suddenly it changed. Yesterday was the first truly glorious spring day with bright sun and temperatures approaching 80 degrees. It took a long time but it seems spring has finally arrived!
And all of this winter’s rain seems to have finally dented California’s multi year drought problem. That’s a good thing!
You must be logged in to post a comment.