My first night flight..

After talking about it for five years or so I’ve finally started my night rating. I don’t know if I’ll get it done by the time summer arrives but at least I’m having a bit of a go at it, and it’s something different!

Several of us turned up last night for a mass briefing, then one by one flew with an instructor on our first night flights. One person opted for a 172, the others and myself decided we’d take an Archer. Problem was, the landing light on the Archer was unserviceable, so when it came time for me to go – 8:30PM last night, we took the 172.

I have only been flying at night on Flight Sim, so it was a huge shock for me to get up over the city and find that, yep, it looks exactly like it does on Flight Sim!! A web of yellowy dots and that’s a city!! Fantastic!!!! The whole experience is different, from flying with panel lights to seeing your landing light in the sky in front of you.. Awesome experience!

Now some details:

The whole thing of taxiing at night takes some getting used to, especially as we don’t have a sealed taxiway on our side of the airport. So we taxi through the grass hoping to avoid bogging down. Then we line up and go, and it’s straight onto the instruments. In my case the turn coordinator is not working in that plane, so it’s onto the AH and away we go.. I didn’t have too many issues last night as I’m happy flying on instruments, and there was a little horizon we could see so no worries. For the first 15 mins or so we flew over town, I flew over what I thought was my house, and then we went out and did some exercises, including steep turns while looking at the blackness, and found I pulled back way too hard! Have to work on that next time.

We then went back and did some circuits, and I found I was way high on base leg then after going down fast, we were too low on finals. Also something to work on. My landings weren’t too bad, considering it was might first night flight, and I didn’t break the plane!!

On my second circuit, as we were climbing out, the artificial horizon started a slight bank on it’s own for a few seconds and then, WHAM, just fell over to about 60 degrees angle of bank and sat there. My instructor saw it at the same time as I did and pointed out we’d just lost our AH. Bearing in mind the turn coordinator was also not operational, and we were climbing out at 9PM at night, pointing away from the lights of town, with no turn coordinator and no AH. Yay!
We were able to pick out enough horizon to allow us to continue, and I flew the rest of the circuit and landed, unfortunately having to cut the lesson short, but it was fun all right!!!
It then occurred to me that they talked at length about having a torch and to use it immediately if you have lights or electrical failure, but there was no mention of what to do if the instruments aren’t worth looking at!!

Anyway, a good fun lesson, a bit of drama, and I hope they fix both planes soon!!!