There’s no difference between flying in daylight and flying at night—except you can’t see anything. So goes the sage advice from my old flight instructor, and he’s essentially right. The airplane doesn’t know or care that its pilot is visually impaired during the hours of darkness. It performs and responds just as it does in daytime. However, we, as the human pilot, are the weak link in the conduct of successful night flight. Accordingly, we must respect our limitations, and they are manifestly increased when we fly in the dark.
We are supremely blessed with our freedom to fly as we choose in the United States, and this liberty extends to the FAA’s tolerance of night flight. The FARs make few restrictions on our ability to fly after sundown, mandating only slightly higher flight visibility for VFR operation, 15 minutes more reserve fuel and a separate recent-experience requirement. Even if you haven’t flown at night for year or more, you’re perfectly legal to blast off solo at midnight in a single-engine airplane under an overcast with three miles of drizzly visibility. Dumb, but legal.
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With such freedom comes great responsibility. In much of the world, only instrument-rated pilots are allowed to fly at night. If we’re going to continue unfettered VFR night flight, we must avoid bringing attention to ourselves through a noticeable increase in accidents. That means we often must restrict our nighttime activities in a manner far beyond the bare bones of FAA regulations.
Rather than requiring a specific “night VFR rating,” the FAA mandates that all, with few exceptions, would-be private pilots complete night training in order to qualify for the license. The perfunctory three hours and 10 takeoffs and landings, with 100 miles of cross-country night flying, are all completed with an instructor in the right seat. It is questionable whether 40-hour students are then truly up to speed on night flying, having barely proven themselves capable of daytime flying. Nevertheless, those are the training standards we’ve been using for years.
In my career, I’ve seen the pilot certification rules change from requiring no night training at all, leaving it up to the new pilot to get checked out at night on his own when the time came, to an option of having “night flying prohibited” placed on the license if the applicant wanted to skip night training, and then finally a shift to mandatory night qualification. I have trained pilots for night flying under all the systems, and I always found the three hours to be about right for a night checkout. Today, even though they’re legal for night flying, I still recommend new private pilots log about 100 hours in daylight and then come back for a night refresher course before they try it on their own. The added experience will make the difficult task of night flying much more tolerable, and their confidence will be greatly increased.
I received my PPL-SEL in the western US in the ’70s. At that time, it was mandatory to include both night flying and mountain flying in the curriculum, as well as full spin training. Great idea, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and went on to many happy, safe hours of nighttime mountain crossings – no traffic, often VU conditions, no turbulence, entirely safe – always having identified airstrips and highways within gliding range should anything occur.
Having returned to Canada years ago, the idiocy of anything different became apparent. Here, one can get a PPL for flat land only(!). Extra and separate endorsement and training for both nighttime or mountain flying were required. Obvious outcome: many fatal crashes by pilots testing their envelope, often with buddies on board as the sun went down and/or the mountains lured them in for a looksee.
The other major problem with Canada’s regulations? Unless recently changed, VFR-on-top is illegal, the subsequent result being VFR pilots scud-running over ridges hoping for a better outcome on the other side. Often not so. The fatality rate in Canada is several times that of the US, per mile flown, for these various reasons.
To become at one with your aircraft, nothing is so stirring and satisfying as walking your craft down in a falling leaf descent. Which, or course, should you have a nighttime engine failure, allows you to meet the dark terrain at the lowest possible airspeed and rate of descent, under full control.
I agree. I have flown at night with my instructor & if you do it by your self you are fulling your self. With that said night flying at night is very beautiful, but you can get in to a lot of
trouble. With practice it is very doable.
And yet, because my Abbotsford, B.C. flying school understood I would be flying out if a Canyon Gravel Mountain Strip, post training, I got Basic Training in Many actual “Off Airport”, & “Unimproved” Strips, and training in a Cessna 182, with a Canyon Flight in to my Home Strip, and an actual Over Mountain detour on the return leg, since I expected to buy in to a Local older model 182, when I finished!