Stage 2 Part Three - Night Flights
It’s been almost 3 months since I last wrote. No, I didn’t stop flying, I’m flying as much as ever. I’m going to keep writing about my training, but know that much of what I’m about to write is quite a bit out of date.
When last I posted, I was squarely in the middle of stage 2, which as you’ll remember is about performance takeoffs and landings, navigation and cross countries, and night flying. Today I’ll talk about night flights. To get your private pilot certificate, you need 3 hours of night flying, a cross-country at night of at least 100 nautical miles (NM), and 10 night takeoffs and landings to a full-stop. The syllabus is organized so that you can get this done in two flights. Flight one gets you familiar with what it means to fly at night, and you do 5 takeoffs and landings. Flight two is your cross country, and you get 5 more takeoffs and landings.
The first flight, we decided to both have some fun in addition to our training. Firstly, we prepped the plane as normal, but had to do it all in the dark. It’s different in the dark, because you can’t see as well. Really. It’s harder. I learned that white light is not great for night vision, so you use a flashlight that emits red light. Other than the oddness of the red light, the preflight, taxi, takeoff were all exactly the same. It was a clear night, and the lights of Seattle were laid out in front of us. We flew over to the practice area and spun through all the maneuvers. Slow flight, stalls, steep turns. At night, the horizon is not as visible, and I hadn’t realized quite how much I relied on it until it wasn’t there.
We then opted to do the “city tour”, a flight around Seattle’s waterfront. The airspace there is congested, to say the least. SeaTac traffic is high, landing over the city, and Boeing Field has the lower portion of the airspace. Troy worked the radios, talked to Boeing Field’s tower, and got permission to do the tour. We flew across the northern edge of the city from east to west, then turned south over the water. We were at about 900 feet and I snapped my best aviation picture ever. From there, we went over to Boeing Field to do a few landings. We then headed back to Renton to call it a night.
Our night cross-country was about a week and a half later. This was in mid-October, and my experience living in the Pacific Northwest led me to believe that the weather would start to deteriorate. On this particular night, the weather was a little threatening. Showers were reported in the area, but weather reports at the various airports indicated the VFR (visual flight rules, i.e. mostly cloud-free) conditions were expected. We decided to head to Skagit Regional (KBVS), which at just a bit over 50 NM from Renton would quality as a cross country. Unlike my first cross country, where Troy insisted that we do all the planning on paper, for this flight, we used ForeFlight (on my iPad) and the G1000 (in the airplane). With the flight plan programmed in, the navigation systems of the G1000 would tell us when to turn, how far we were from the next waypoint, and our expected time of arrival.
Right after take off, we flew through a squall. It was rainy and pretty choppy, and visibility was diminished. We needed to stay clear of the clouds with 3 miles of visibility to maintain a VFR flight. Luckily, it never got worse than that. Just north of Everett, the squall dissipated, and the weather was clear for the rest of the flight. Our route took us over Arlington Airport, then followed highway I-5 for about 20 miles, and then we’d be at Skagit. Flying over the highway at night was pretty wicked. It was like those cars were there just to point the way for us.
When we were about 10 miles from Skagit, we tuned in to their weather broadcast. This gives us key data like cloud ceilings, visibility, altimeter settings, and wind. Based on the wind, we picked a runway. Here’s where this particular flight got interesting. Most airports have runway lights, but they’re not on all the time. Instead, many airports have “pilot-controlled lighting”. You tune your radios to a certain frequency, and then click the mic a bunch of times (7, to be precise, for maximum brightness), and then the lights come on. It’s pretty low tech but it works. We tuned to the appropriate frequency, and I clicked away. And…nothing. No lights. Tried again. Nothing. This is an uncontrolled airport, so we were asking on the radio if anyone else was out there, but no one was flying that night. We started circling over the airport, taking turns trying to figure out our options. We tried our other bank of radios (the airplane has two), tried different frequencies. We double-checked the NOTAMs to be sure that there wasn’t a known maintenance problem.
After about 5 minutes of orbiting, Troy decided to use the localizer to land. I have to give the guy credit - he takes every flying situation as an opportunity to teach. When he was getting it setup, he said, “Ok, this could be a real emergency. You’re low on gas, it’s night, and the lights don’t work. This could happen, so let’s deal with it.” The localizer is a radio system that’s used for precision approaches when there is low visibility. The radio emits a signal that’s perfectly aligned with the runway, and a receiver in the airplane can tell you if you’re left or right of that signal. He quickly showed me how to use it, and we started our descent. Once we got stabilized on the approach, I could also use the glide slope lights that are just to the left of the runway for a reference point. I must say, for a super low light situation, my touchdown was pretty solid. We taxied off the runway, then headed back to the starting point, got on the runway again, and took off. When I turned my head back to look at the runway, the lights were on. Sigh. To this day, we still don’t know what happened.
Given that the lights weren’t reliably working at Skagit, we headed over to Paine Field to get a couple more night landings done. Paine is another airport (along with Renton and Boeing Field) that Boeing uses for airplane construction. Flying over that airport at night was like looking at an airplane beehive. All the airplanes under construction were lit up and people were all over them, making them ready to fly. The rest of the flight was uneventful.