Inside my cockpit, the tools of the night pilot's trade are already useful. The red beam of my flashlight flits about as I locate the checklist and get ready to start up. I'm a bit of a redundancy bug; there are two more flashlights in my flight bag and extra batteries as well. And from two keychains in my pocket dangle two miniature lights.
After startup, I get the radios going and adjust cockpit lighting. Everyone has different tastes for this. I prefer the faint glow of a red cockpit light and the minimum comfortable instrument-panel lighting. I turn on my taxi lights and follow the short strip of blue taxiway lights toward the runway, holding short while the inbound traffic completes its circuit and lands. Positioned facing the runway, I turn off my taxi light momentarily as the exiting aircraft swings across my bow. Someone did this for me years ago, and I was impressed with the thoughtfulness of the gesture.
By now the runway lights have been on for several minutes, so I click the mic button a few times to adjust the intensity and reset the timer. Having the lights go out during the takeoff run is a learning experience worth serving up during training, but there's no need to fall for my own trick tonight.
I taxi into position, using the aircraft lights to locate the centerline, and after a brief run I am off. Once airborne, there is no need for the landing light with its distracting glow. I will turn it on again well before reaching the home field.
Once the lights of the airport are behind me, my climb on this moonless night is as much an instrument procedure as a visual one. That means shallow maneuvers and a good instrument scan.
Time spent in cruise flight will be brief, taking me across a line of low ridges. In day visual conditions I cross these ridges at 2,000 feet, which is only slightly lower than the altitudes published for the instrument approaches that traverse them. At night, I find an extra thousand feet of altitude more comforting. Not that it would make much practical difference if I needed to land immediately in the blackness. But the additional altitude brings the busy glow of my home city into view that much sooner, and it allows me to pick up the ATIS broadcast and establish contact with approach control on the first try.
The ride is smooth, my destination is in sight, and I will be on the ground in about 15 minutes. Sure beats the tedious drive over those same hills. The wind is blowing from the west, which will mean a straight-in landing on Runway 33. Now I start thinking about that landing.
Well, almost. You can't land on a runway you can't see. In the blackness on the western edge of the city, you'd never suspect the presence of an airport, reminding me of how elusive our huge, former military runway can be when the tower has the lights turned down low. The rotating beacon, so strong and piercing when viewed from the ground, appears from the air as a mere wink among the glare of surrounding lights. If I were to key the mic and ask the tower to turn 'em up, the place would be visible from Mars. But there's no need to increase the taxpayers' light bill just to amuse myself. Student pilots sampling night flight for the first time at this airport are amazed at how darkness conceals a two-mile-long runway, causing a tendency to wander around looking for the field. It's a good lesson.
There's some light chop now. I am approaching the ridges, and the air, flowing across them at a 45-degree angle, is disturbed. My groundspeed tells me that despite the few knots reported on the ground, up here the wind is stronger. That could mean a wind shear zone during the descent. At night, when our vision is less acute and reliable, we must be alert to all the clues that tell us what might happen next.
There's probably no shear, but there's no reason to be taken by surprise, either. In the black hole west of the city I can now discern two faint rows of lights - runway lighting, greatly foreshortened in appearance by my straight-in approach. The blue fringe of taxiway lighting is also visible. The centerline lights are off.
Prelanding checks completed, landing light on, power reduced for a leisurely descent. No other traffic is near. I am Number One for the field. I am crabbed several degrees into the west wind. On about a one-mile final, if the wind is still blowing down low, I will transition to a wing-low approach, using the forward slip's combination of aileron into the wind and opposite rudder to keep the airplane aligned correctly for landing. I expect negligible wind at ground-level, which would be typical for this time of night and season, but my mind is open to other possibilities. Surprises happen in all seasons, and I remain alert.
Like many pilots, only a small fraction of my personal flying occurs at night. I am grateful for the time I have spent instructing in the dark. It has added so much to my perception of nocturnal aviation. The experience reminds me to be wary of low-level wind shears that can spring out of the night's seeming calm. It reminds me of the exaggerated appearance that the small crab angle I am holding conveys when defined only by two long rows of runway lights. Not having flown much at night lately, I resolve not to commit the common error of flaring high and dropping into a dark abyss that has a hard runway for its bottom. Rare is the trainee who does not suffer this indignity several times in the first hours. I also have a recovery strategy in mind, recalling a time when, having fallen into this trap, I papered over the mistake with a late blast of power that made the landing look good to my charter passenger and brought a grin to the company mechanic riding up front.
Auto headlights stream across bridges spanning the river a mile out on final as I make another power adjustment and lower a first installment of flaps. The small yellow blob of urban lights that I beheld from 20 miles away has spread around me. The city is alive. A ballgame is being played on a school athletic field. A motorist has been stopped by a police car - the officer's blue lights are flashing. My airplane, with its own luminous points, is now part of the scene. To another aircraft that has just reported inbound, I am the traffic its crew has picked out of the clutter. My mind is processing past nocturnal flights in a subconscious checklist of possible outcomes of my landing, now just seconds away. A deer or other animal could suddenly appear in my lights, forcing a go-around. My landing light could fail; I fleetingly remember a practice session with a student whom I required to land several times without it - on the return home, it failed for real.
The wind has vanished as I cross the boundary fence. The numbers appear in my lights as I roll out of my crabbed approach, realign the longitudinal axis by relaxing the opposite rudder pressure, and add full flaps. The edge lights are set low and the runway is wide, creating the sensation of descending into a mine shaft. On nights like this, absent peripheral vision, sensing ground effect helps me judge the appropriate flare height... and there it is. I begin pulling back on the yoke to hold the airplane off the ground but keep the throttle set a trace above idle just to be prudent. A glance to the side of the nose confirms that my height above the pavement is correct for my attitude and descent rate. Idle power. The aircraft obediently gives back its last few inches of altitude, and the wheels begin to roll. Routine, but gratifying.
It isn't always that way, of course. Just as night adds dimension to routine flight, the non-routine is also amplified. This can be both invigorating and exasperating. A late-evening winter charter yanks me away from a warm woodstove but places me and an awestruck passenger above a spectacular snow-covered landscape that glows under a dazzling full moon. A summer evening spent practicing instrument approaches under the stars ends in a frenetic charge down the same glideslope to outrace a fog bank moving so swiftly that our ample runway is obscured in minutes. A late ferrying flight from a nontowered field leads to my only total communications failure - a merely annoying proposition on a fair day, but greatly vexing at night, with the runway lights about to go out behind me and the tower-controlled airport ahead unaware of my intended arrival. (That story ends with a chuckle as the effort to locate and land at the departure field barely beats the expiration of the lights - and a fortuitously hard landing brings the radio back to life. My second departure is uneventful.)
For many pilots, a small percentage of flight time occurs in the wee hours. It's my opinion that a thousand-hour pilot with 10 hours of night flight should approach nocturnal missions with the humility of a 10-hour pilot; one of our sadder local stories is of a cocky day flier whose homemade attempt to illuminate an unlit mountain strip led to failure and a fatality.
There have been bigger missions than tonight's but no more rewarding ones. I taxi between the blue lights, turn onto the ramp, and shut down. The attendants are gone for the night but will come out early tomorrow morning and top off the airplane for another day's labors. And perhaps another night's.
Related Articles
