By an edhat reader
I’m a concerned SB citizen and wondering if you can help me out with something that is disrupting the neighborhood up here around the Riviera. What do you know about jets circling overhead for about an hour or more every night around midnight over Santa Barbara for the last week or two? It’s been not only disruptive but disturbing.
Those are not planes circling overhead. Those are late night departures from LAX heading to Asia. Weather plays a major impact on how far sound travels. I can hear them from my inside my apartment near Oak Park just the same.
OP I sympathize. Pay no attention to the Edhat snarkers.
Riviera is like a half mile wide….planes going 500 miles an hour…
There sure are midnight and later flights into SBA. I’m regularly on one that gets in from SFO at something like 12:05.
Are they circling or just passing over? There shouldn’t be any midnight flights into SB, so they are either very high and passing over or something very nutty is going on!
You always hear the commercial traffic late night with this type of weather . 3-5 miles up is like a busy two lane Highway .
With am iPhone you can simply ask Siri what planes are bove me right now and voila! it will provide the information to you like magic.
We live on the Mesa. For the past week, we hear a noticeable roar just after midnight. It lasts about 15-20 minutes. It sounds like a large plane off the coast.
As others have commented, the weather is very odd this year causing all sorts of unusual occurrences. The jet stream is producing the highest speeds ever recorded with planes traveling upwards of 800mph across the country. The cold we are feeling is due to a shift in the polar airflow as well, which is causing a lot of strange weather here and further down in the southland. Have you ever seen it snow in Malibu how about Phoenix? I doubt it… You can log onto anyone of the many flight tracking sites and see what’s flying but its likely just an atmospheric shift that’s pushing the sound towards our mountains where it bounces back towards the sea and across the riviera’s ridge line.
No circling, too expensive to fly jets in circles. Probably hearing jets from LAX fly over San Marcos VOR, a navigation facility that NW bound departures from LAX use to go to SF, PDX, Asia. If the humidity and winds are right, you can hear them. BTW they are usually flying above 25,000′ as they pass over SB.
We are in Mission Canyon near the Botanic Gardens and have also noticed this. It’s not unusual to hear air traffic, but this is different. Noticeably louder and lasts longer than the typical fly-over. More of a curiosity than a problem, IMO.