Night Flying

N711PG    Cessna 172 CalAggie CAFF Cal Aggie Flying Farmers

Night flight holds a certain magic for me and is one of the most peaceful times to fly with typically calm air, less air traffic, and a quiet radio, each contributing to an especially pleasant flight environment. As you lift off the ground and slowly climb above it all, the lights of the city begin to lie out in front and all around you, slightly twinkling as you fly along. There is nothing actually magical about city lights at night, but the sight of a city from the air still manages to make me feel something, maybe even a little starry eyed.

Flying at night is so pleasant it can have the negative effect of lulling one into a false sense of security. The added dangers of night flying can really add up to make it a whole different animal from day flight, to the point that I’m surprised the FAA hasn’t required a unique rating specifically for night flight. Here are some of the more challenging aspects of flying at night: at altitude, it can be almost impossible to distinguish if the horizon you think you see, is the bottom of a cloud or the top of the earth, a lack of depth perception on especially dark nights requires a pilot pay special attention to altitude when near mountains, when close to the ground it is hard to distinguish the lights of a moving airplane from ground lights – which reminds me of a flight last summer.

I was on a night flight with a buddy of mine and had just done a landing at the Woodland airport which is just around the airplane corner from my little Davis airport, on the way back we decided to take a couple of turns over Dixon, not that there’s much to see, it’s just more interesting that doing turns over the pitch black earth. After we impressed each other with our turns around a point, we headed back over to the Davis (KEDU) airport. To properly set up for the approach to KEDU, you fly east from Dixon until 45 degrees east of the runway, then you turn in to enter the traffic pattern. While heading east from Dixon, I caught a flash of light just off my right wing that was barely discernable from a light on the ground when a never seen before instinct took over and I quickly banked hard left. Afterword my buddy confirmed that that flash of light that I’d seen was a helicopter that had apparently seen the flash of my airplane lights and quickly banked away as well. Never before and certainly not since have I ever come so close to another aircraft, though I still never saw the helicopter, something just told me that the light I saw wasn’t on the ground and was in fact closer than it should be, so I reacted.

What I really took away from that moment was to never become lulled into a false sense calm and comfort when flying, especially at night. I remember back when I was in flight training when my instructors would repeatedly tell me to keep up my “scan” which is pilot talk for continuing to look out all the windows for oncoming traffic. What I never understood until that night flight, is how little time it takes for two approaching airplanes to close in on each other. I’m still not sure how close I was to the Helicopter that day, but certainly close enough to make me appreciate having had the correct gut reaction to bank hard when I did.

Flying at night, low over a city of lights is a really special experience that allows me to really appreciate the joy and freedom of flight while also keeping my flying skills and pilot instinct alive and kicking - and I guess that’s part of the reason I keep coming back for more!