I was commuting on a weekly basis in my Grumman AA-1 Yankee between Hanford, California, deep in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, and Oakland. The California winter had arrived, and the jet stream had dropped down from Seattle to bring us our share of Pacific fronts. My initial response to these, as a low-time VFR pilot, was to drive. I droned along Interstate 5, staring up at a 5,000-foot overcast with severe clear beneath, cursing the Cassandras among the Oakland Flight Service Station weather briefers. I swore often that next time I would at least see how far I could get by air.
I cautiously extended my competence through the "take it up and see" approach. To my delight, I found that I could usually complete the trip by air. On some occasions, I slipped between the Oakland hills and a soggy 3,000-foot ceiling only to find my way completely barred by a line of stratus squatting over the Altamont Pass — the next range of hills between me and the wide Central Valley. A one-eighty back to Oakland and my car cost me only an hour or so for the attempt.
Soon, I no longer found it worrisome to fly through light rain or stay VFR through the broken-to-scattered scud that frequently lay strewn between me and Hanford. But apparently Mother Nature decided that I was becoming too complacent.
The briefing I'd received had been substantially the same one I'd heard earlier: a moist, unstable air mass left behind the front, ceiling 3,000 to 5,000 broken to overcast, visibility 10 miles or greater, areas down to four miles in light rain and mist, with scattered thunderstorms. My easterly heading on the trip down had kept me well below the cloud layer at the 3,500-foot VFR altitude, but my westerly return heading gave me the choice to fly either at 4,500 feet msl, just beneath the overcast, or below 3,000. As I had Altamont Pass and the Oakland hills to cross at the end of my trip, I elected to cruise at the higher altitude.
I'd been through several thin veils of rain, wafting down out of the darker patches of the overcast above, experiencing minor bumps. I'd just come out of one such veil only to view — up through the clear canopy into the overcast cloud layer above — a great inverted basin of white, with floating drifts of fluff suspended in the middle, and the curving white wall of the basin tumbling away like a cliff. Along the distant rim of the basin, I could see the lower overcast resuming. The darkest portion lay directly across my line of flight, about 15 miles away, where the hills began to rise up toward Altamont Pass, and as I crossed the clearing I noticed another rain veil drifting down out of the darkness.
I was closer to the far rim, and the veil of rain along its brink seemed to be turning into a curtain falling out of a deep blackness. Another clearing was to the north over the middle of the valley, and I turned in that direction.
The darkness grew with dramatic swiftness as I approached the edge of the basin. I was congratulating myself on a wise decision to divert when the darkness was replaced by a glaring wall of white as flashes of lightning illuminated the overcast, looking like a huge white-hot filament buried within the cloud. A deafening crash of thunder followed, and I instinctively banked away from the stroke.
Turning onto my new heading, the first wave of turbulence hit. A powerful blow slammed in from above and behind, driving my head into the canopy with enough force to knock my headset into my lap.
The sound of the Yankee's racing engine reminded me to pull the power back to 1,800 rpm. I fought the wings level and brought the nose up, trying to slow down and maintain a gentle turn back toward the clearing in front of me. I was nose down again with about 60 degrees of bank, looking at silos and an orchard, but the vertical speed indicator (VSI) was reading a 400-fpm climb. I opted to pull the power all the way back and raised the nose just enough to settle the airspeed about 5 mph below maneuvering speed.
The next five minutes consisted of kidney punches and whiplash as the storm battered the sturdy little Grumman. My concerns were to keep the wings level and airspeed below critical limits. I was 800 feet above the valley floor before I finally reached relatively calm air and felt safe enough to turn west again and look back at my nemesis. The towering wall of the classic cumulonimbus rose, and another flicker of lightning blinked in its middle.
I still make the commute to Hanford, but I hug the valley floor and give all but the palest columns of rain a wide berth. I now have a greater awareness of how quickly weather can go from challenging to deadly.
Thomas E. Wagner, AOPA 1011229, of Piedmont, California, owns a Grumman Yankee and has more than 560 hours.
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