I don't know his name, and I didn't quite catch his N-number. But somewhere in the San Francisco area, there's a pilot who owes me an apology.
I was flying my Cheetah down to the Oakland International Airport on July 4th to pick up a friend who was flying in for a visit. It was a pleasant morning, clear and smooth, and I was enjoying the short flight south across the Bay. I was at about 2,500 feet, still outside of the Class B airspace but talking to Bay Approach, when the controller called out traffic at my same altitude, going the opposite direction, at 11 o'clock and one mile. I looked and quickly spotted a fast-moving gray plane headed past me, to my left.
"Roger, Bay Approach, Niner-Four-Uniform's got the ?"
My transmission trailed off as I watched the gray plane pull up, bank steeply around and proceed to dive straight toward me from my seven
o'clock position. Good Lord! What was this guy up to? My heart choked, then began pounding. Did he see me? What kind of evasive action could or should I take? As I watched, the gray plane abruptly stopped its dive, pulling up into a loose formation position 50 yards or so to my left and a little behind and below me. The controller called again.
"Niner-Four-Uniform, that traffic's now ?"
"I SEE the traffic!" I answered sharply. "He's right here, taking way too close a look at me, or something. What the hell is he up to?? Are you talking to him?"
"Negative," the controller answered. "We've got him on radar, but he's not talking to anyone."
A lightning-fast torrent of emotions and thoughts raced through me. At first, I had thought the plane might be a military plane doing an intercept on me. It was, after all, July 4th and tensions about possible terrorist activities were high. But now that I could see the plane more clearly, I knew that wasn't the case. It was definitely a high-performance plane, painted an all-over light gray, with a bright yellow nose, but it was a prop plane, not a jet. It had the distinctive dorsal fin and tandem, bubble-canopy cockpit of a Pilatus PC-7, although it could have been just a plane that looked similar to a Pilatus. But whatever it was, I was at its mercy, because it clearly had both speed and maneuverability on my poor little fixed-gear Cheetah.
Part of me surged with the same defensive anger I feel on a New York subway when some unsavory-looking character gets too close. "This is my space, dammit, get out of it!" I silently fumed at the gray and yellow intruder. But then another possibility occurred to me. What if he was just fooling around in the sky and just happened to have leveled out just there? What if he didn't actually see me? That was an even scarier thought.
As I watched, the gray plane suddenly banked up and away, then circled around once again. The controller called with two more traffic targets, and I registered a vague awareness of their positions, but I didn't look for them. My eyes were riveted on the much more threatening wild-card target just off my left side. Now he was diving down on me again, this time straight from my nine o'clock position. All I could do was keep a straight and level line and hope that he really did see me and didn't actually want to ram me broadside. As I watched, my heart hammering in my throat, the gray plane dove down, passed directly underneath me, and disappeared beneath my fuselage somewhere toward the coastal hills.
