Good News, Bad News...

A cold night immediately after a cold front's blown through the Bay Area, a forecast of scattered cumulonimbus, rain, and thunderstorms on our filed route to Stockton... but all around Oakland and the Bay it's actually clear or clearing, with bright moonlight lighting up the remaining few clouds and no ripples on the puddles around the planes at the Old T's. But it hasn't cleared over Stockton and the Central Valley, where icing levels are near the MEA, and we make the obvious decision not to chance it, and settle for a quick flight out over San Pablo Bay, the VOR/DME 29 approach into Petaluma (partial panel, with hold), then the ILS back in to Oaktown, all in 05D with the steam gauges (4JG is undergoing a 100 hour inspection).

The good news: the Death Grip is slowly loosening its hold on me, and nothing about this flight is remarkable or difficult, including the hold and the approaches. The bad news: I won't be flying again until after Thanksgiving, i.e. about four weeks from now, when I return from Oz. Oh well. By then I'll probably have trouble remembering what those thingies on the panel in front of me are for...

* * *

As we depart Oakland we start seeing immense lightning flashes to our North, bright enough to be clearly visible even under the Cone Of Stupidity. For most of the rest of flight we keep a wary lookout -- the thunderstorms are about twenty to forty miles away, and appeared out of nowhere (as reported by NorCal and a bunch of on-air comments), and they're causing havoc with flights into Sacramento and the Valley. At one point John has me look up and watch as an almost-continuous series of flashes lights up a set of tall thunderheads somewhere out over Lake Berryessa or Woodland. Cool! But not the sort of thing you really want to cope with in any sort of plane, let alone a 172. And certainly not what you'd expect in coastal Northern California, where we're lucky to see one (usually quite pathetic) thunderstorm a year....

* * *

On the approach back in to Oakland we're vectored towards the localiser just outside FITKI (the FAF, where the glode slope intersection is supposed to happen at 1,500') at the usual "best forward speed" and at an assigned altitude of 3,000'. At the last second the NorCal controller lets us down to 2,500' until established -- only a mile or two from FITKI when we're not yet established. I'm fit to scream -- we've got a maximum of two miles to descend 1,500' through the glideslope at 110 knots, join the localiser, intercept the glide slope from below, and stabilise the approach (all with the likelyhood of some corporate Gulfstream bearing down on us further up the ILS at high speed from SUNOL) -- but I decide to see what happens and how this plays out, since it's the sort of thing you need to be able to handle one way or another on approaches to major airports. Nothing bad happens -- I make it, just -- but the tempation to grumpily query the controller or go missed at this point gets very strong.... John (as usual) has a few pithy things to say about the way the NorCal guys are making this a regular thing nowadays, and discusses a few strategies for coping.