After Dark

Tonight was the first night flight (in the left seat, anyway). I was nervous, just because it's another aspect of flying that I haven't done much of. I was also keeping a close eye on the winds, since they were calm all day, but were forecast to come up ahead of a cold front.

I arrived at the field just before 8, and met the new instructor that I would be flying with. He does part-time instructing, focusing on nights and weekends. My regular instructor's schedule is too busy to do much night flying (being limited to 8 hours per day of flight time).

I was mentally prepared for the difficulties of night flying, plus, I had tried to get accustomed to the cockpit switches without looking at them over the past few flights. That only worked partially...the dark is still very disorienting.

But, it was a calm, cool night, with a nearly full moon and clear skies. There was one other plane in the pattern, and I was ready to go. We had to make a quick takeoff to get ahead of a plane on final, but other than that, the whole flight was fairly low-pressure. We took off and when we got to about 100 feet above the ground, the wind made itself apparent. It was a fairly consistent 15 knots or so I'm guessing, and we had at least 10 degrees of crab angle to maintain course. Since I was with the "new guy", we went out of the pattern and did some rough ground reference over roads so that he could see how I would track in the winds.

Apparently, I did all right, since we only spent about 10 minutes on that, made a few 180's and 360's, and then headed back to the pattern for touch-and-go's. All of my reading about night approaches focused on the tendency to be higher and faster than during the day. The rule is, fly just the same at night. Which means, however, that my old hurdle of having a bit too much speed and power came back to haunt me again. I managed to maintain decent landings, though, and we touched down smoothly, even if it wouldn't have been good enough if I was at a short runway.

I didn't seem to have too much of the typical feeling of being too high in the flare, just being a bit high on final. So once I was over the numbers, things smoothed out. The other tricky condition was that the gusty winds consistently stayed above about 100 feet. So I got to play with maintaining a slip into the wind for most of the approach, then having the wind drop out and having to re-correct for the lack of gusts. The result was good crosswind practice, but a forgiving touchdown, with a nice, squealing stall horn. One of the approaches even had a pretty big downdraft, which kept things interesting.

We did a couple go-arounds, then switched off the landing light to see if I could still stick it. With the full moon, I could just barely make out the centerline as we were ready to flare. I flared just a bit high on the first "dark" landing, but the next two were squeakers as well. Then, we did a no-flap landing, which means a much longer float down the runway, but again, a smooth touchdown.

Total, we did 8 landings tonight, and I enjoyed the night flying. I didn't get much time for sightseeing over the city lights, but it was sure a good night for the first go at it.