Flying at Night

One of the FAA requirements for a pilot's license is three hours of experience flying at night. When I'm a passenger on a commercial flight, I love flying at night. The air is smoother, the city lights always sparkle, and everyone's sleepy, which makes for a very calm and peaceful flight.

Piloting an airplane at night is not so peaceful. For me, it was very stressful. Night flying is challenging, for the obvious reason that it's really hard to see anything! Pilotage (navigating by landmarks) is all but impossible. Mountains become practically invisible. And there's no good horizon to reference.

I had no idea how hard it would be to spot airports at night from the air. I thought that since they take up so much land and are so well-lit, they would just jump out at me. On the contrary; to spot an airport from the air, you look for a dark spot! The runway lights are designed to only be visible when you're close-in. In fact, the best strategy for finding an airport at night is to look for the beacon, which is a rotating green-and-white spotlight that is usually mounted on a tall tower or on top of a building, like a nineteenth-century lighthouse guiding ships into port.

Night flying isn't all bad, though. It's really easy to spot other planes because of their bright, flashing lights. Also the air is very smooth and there is hardly any wind.

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Flying to Palm Springs

The FAA also requires student pilots to get five hours of experience in solo long-distance flights. My flight to San Luis Obispo (which I talked about here) satisfied 3.5 hours. To get the other 90 minutes, I decided to fly to Palm Springs.

And what a flight! Whereas my flight up the coast to SBP was quiet and uneventful (just look at all those pictures I had time to take), this flight was busy. It started, like my last flight, by almost being cancelled (that is kind of a theme in general aviation). Low, overcast clouds had descended over Santa Monica and were not forecast to be gone for hours. Fortunately my flight instructor, who is instrument-rated and able to fly through clouds (in a single bound!), offered to fly with me to Van Nuys airport (in the sunny San Fernando valley), where he could catch a cab back to Santa Monica and I could continue on to PSP in the plane. So we did that, and I got a little taste of flying an IFR clearance. Fun!

So the weather was mitigated, but I had another complication to contend with: Joe Biden. The vice president was in town, and with him came "temporary flight restrictions," or TFRs. So I had to plan my flight around those areas where he was planning to be.

Fortunately my flight plan worked out perfectly, and I stayed out of the no-fly zones and made it to Palm Springs in just about one hour. Unlike my last flight, this one took me through some very crowded airspace, and I spent a lot of time talking to air traffic control and didn't get to take many pictures in flight. I did get a picture of my old high school, though. I thought that was cool.

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Believe it or not, I'm almost done. I've got all the required experience, including the forty hours of total flight time for which this blog is named. From here on out, I'm just practicing for the checkride (and studying for the written exam). I did a "mock checkride" last weekend, in which my instructor played the role of FAA examiner and put me through all the maneuvers as if I were being tested. I won't lie; it went miserably, but at least I now know what I need to practice. Stay tuned!