B
bayareapilot
Guest
I'm a freshly-minted PPL. Wanted to go on a bay tour but Norcal wasn't doing surface transitions, so I elected to fly north up the coast (half moon bay, pacifica, to golden gate bridge). As I was flying along, there is a part of the Bravo that has a 1600 foot ceiling, so I descended to 2000ft in preparation. This put me close to St. Pedro Point, and as I got closer I noticed my aircraft had a nose-high attitude, falling airspeed, dropping altitude despite no change in power setting. As I passed the ridge, I ran into some serious turbulence (for a C152), and then finally some updrafts (much to my relief). After Sharp Park (VPSSP) it was all smooth sailing.
Lessons learned:
Lessons learned:
- I didn't expect such a small ridge to produce such a strong downdraft and turbulence. I'll fly much higher next time (the bravo shelf is 4000 there so I could have easily done so)
- I should be more cognizant of mountain wave and turbulence even by small mountains. I had only expected to find them around the larger, higher altitude mountains near Lake Tahoe
- I had actually considered it was mountain wave activity from the initial downdrafts, but I didn't expect the wind to come from the northeast. After the flight, I did see that KHAF and KSFO were reporting different wind directions (SFO 270, KHAF 020), which would explain the wind over the ridge.
- If this were to happen again, I should have turned away from the ridge. I had plenty of space to do so, the whole ocean was to my left and I was in no danger of being trapped.
- I'm lucky I only encountered slight downdrafts and manageable turbulence, I was only pushed from 2000ft, to 1800ft, to 2400ft
