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Jerry's 58th Lesson: Night VFR...Today's lesson was my first taste of nighttime dual. All I can say is >WOW<. This is the most intense lesson I've had since airplane kindergarten! I set out from work to have dinner and then to the lesson. Went for something light and bracing - Japanese food. Unfortunately, the bagel store was closed, or I would have had one of those for dessert :-). I made it out to SJC a bit early, but so did my instructor. So we just got started early. We did some airplane maintenance; bled a brake. By the time we finished the preflight, it was quite dark. The preflight included checking the nav lights and strobe. Ow! That sucker's bright! We had a ground discussion about airport lighting - runway lights, rotating beacons, that sort of thing. "They're usually pretty hard to see, especially in the city, where everything else is blinking too." With the sunlight gone, the inferiority of 1947 electrics becane obvious; the generator barely kept up with the nav lights and strobe, and went into serious discharge when we turned on the landing light. Unfortunately, I couldn't see to taxi without it. Unless maybe I strapped a white cane with a red tip onto each wing :-). The landing light, BTW, was way cool: it was set into the wing, and pivoted outward on an electric motor when turned on. Getting clearance, taxiing out to the runup area, running up - all of these things went as usual, except that I had to do all of it with a flashlight. I'd stopped at the store over lunch and bought two mini-Mag flashlights; one with 2 AA cells, and another with 2 AAA cells. Both of them red anodized. I'd figured that red things would be easier to find in the dark than black things. The only problem with the mini-Mags is that they throw such a powerful light that your night vision goes away for half an hour after glancing at a checklist. Gotta get a filter for the little one. Once we took off, things got interesting fast. As you may remember from lesson57, the extra seat pad and the flaps handle don't get along. So this time I sat on the bare seat. Mistake. I could barely see over the cowling. We climbed all the way south out of San Jose to a legal VFR cruising altitude of 5500. The city lights below were a fascinating, glittering spectacle. Then we left them behind, and everything got misty and indistinct. As we crossed the hills to the south of San Jose, the ground became covered in fog. The combination of night, fog underneath, and the low seating position effectively removed all visual references. Normally, one maintains airspeed by looking at the nose first, the airspeed gauge second. Boys and girls, I couldn't see the damn nose in front of my face! Well, maybe a little. But with that fog obscuring the ground, there was nothing to reference it to anyway. So there was nothing for it but to watch the gauges. There was a persistant illusion that the airplane was climbing, even though the VSI verified level flight. So I concentrated on the instruments. I've never been under the hood, but I'm sure it's not much more disorienting than this. I'd look away for a moment, and find the turn coordinator telling me that the plane was in a 30 degree bank. He agreed with me that our present conditions were quite similar to partial-panel IFR. I also had to maintain the altitude, watching the airspeed, altimeter and VSI. I can see this "instrument scan" is a skill in its own right. I can say that I never "lost it" like I've heard of other folks doing - I just kept scanning the instruments and doing what they told me to do. With one exception.... That @#$@#$ compass! He kept at me - "fly the heading!" "Don't drift off the heading!" "You turned the wrong way!" Well, I'll concede the point; it's an important skill, to be able to fly an airplane where you want it to go, instead of somewhere else :-). The compass, plus the VOR, plus keeping the airplane level, all added up to quite a workload. He saw I was suffering, and took over the radios. We flew outbound on the SJC VOR, intercepted a radial of the Salinas VOR, and flew over the Salinas airport, waiting for the OBS to go through the region of ambiguity. "You mean to tell me there's an airport down there under all those clouds!?!". Then we turned around and went back to San Jose. Going out, I waffled so much sliding in and out of VOR radials, that he took the plane in exasperation and flew it for a few minutes. Coming back, I did much better; either because I'd learned something, or maybe because there was a big city to aim at. Coming back to SJC, he talked me through my first night landing. I flared too high, he fixed it :-(. Oh, and by the time I saw the rotating beacon, the runways were fully visible too. Although I did see the Reid-Hillview beacon from way further off. How come a puny GA airport has a better beacon than San Jose INTERNATIONAL? We taxied back to parking, I almost fell out of the airplane. We both agreed that it had been a good, productive lesson. I reminded him that as far as the compass was concerned, I was a 5-hour student. Yeah, I know. Excuses, excuses :-). - Jerry "77.3 Hours" Kaidor p.s. I'm exhausted. Good night. |