Lesson 20: Night Operations

Well it finally happened, after a month of cancelled flights, I finally got a night lesson in...and just by the skin of my teeth too!

The first thing I noticed during this lesson was just how dimly lit the instrument panel was. I was expecting each individual instrument to have some sort of back lighting, but to my surprise, they are all lit by a red overhead light in the airplane. It made it quite difficult to read the numbers on the airspeed indicator, instead I relied on knowing where the numbers should be on the gauge.

My instructor had me taxi most of the way without my landing light on, he wanted me to use my beacon lights to determine if I was centered on the taxi way. It is shocking just how invisible the taxiways look without a landing light on. I wasn't allowed to turn my landing light back on until we were cleared for takeoff. When we departed, we flew straight out over the ocean. Once we got away from the city lights, and were surrounded by water, it was quite obvious how different night flying can be. I had to pay attention to my instruments to make sure I was staying straight and level... similar to flying in the clouds I would imagine.

After my instructor was done trying to freak me out, we headed back to the airports traffic pattern to make our first landing. I realized that my usual visual cues I used to determine how to fly each leg of the traffic pattern were gone, and that the runway was really hard to find. Once I did find the runway though, it was easy enough to keep track of it...its finding it initially that was tricky. Trying to judge the landing flare was interesting. When I flared I felt the plane floating, I tried to keep just the right amount of back pressure on the yoke to prevent ballooning, but also preventing hitting the runway too hard. I remember feeling moments when I wasn't exactly sure just how high off the runway the plane was, and just waiting for the plane to SMACK the runway.

After the first landing my instructor upped the difficulty on me. The rest of the landings were done without the landing light on, and one landing was done without the landing light or instrument panel lights...leaving me to land with my flashlight in my mouth so I could read the instruments...uncomfortable, but totally doable. After getting eight landings in we called it a night, and just in time too, because twenty minutes later and the overcast had rolled in pretty thick.

I enjoyed the challenge of night flying. It felt a lot different than the flying I have done thus far, even though it really is the same techniques. Once I get my ticket I don't see myself doing a lot of night flying...you never know though.