You really see when you get those lights down, the world just comes to life.
I'm Jason Miller, a full-time professional flight instructor.
On the Finer Points channel, you can join me as I bring you tips and tricks that I've
learned from 20 years on the flight line.
Hello aviators, welcome back to the Finer Points.
In this video, I'm going to give you three simple tips about night flying that I think
will add to your safety while you're flying out there, maybe inspire you to go get night
current, and give you some confidence to maybe take some passengers up and enjoy this beautiful part of aviation.
First tip is, just to remember that not all nights are created equal.
As part of your flight planning, you really need to consider the phase of the moon, whether
or not there's a high overcast.
If there's, you know, a full moon and snow on the ground it can look beautiful and bright,
almost like one of those 60s movies with like the blue light, you know trying to simulate nighttime.
Other times if there's a high overcast or no moon it can be like ink.
Also, you know, the ground lighting, the sort of light pollution, you have to take that into consideration.
Consider this recent flight that I took out of San Carlos to go get night current.
I took off right here at sunset, that's when your nav lights have to go on by the way,
right at sunset but you can see all of this beautiful ambient light.
This is what it looked like about 30 minutes later, at the end of civil twilight when night officially begins.
And you can see there's still quite a bit of ambient light, and that's why when you
go out for currency, like I was doing on this night, you have to wait a full hour after
sunset, when it's really dark, to do those three takeoffs and landings to a full stop.
But that'll get you night current.
Consider this was a beautiful night, there was a sliver of a moon, there were no clouds in the sky
I'm flying over the bay area where there's lots of ground lighting, lots of ambient light,
so consider that all as part of your flight planning.
The next thing I want to tell you is to remember to dim your lights.
Dim them progressively, it's easy to take off at sunset and have those interior lights
just sort of blaring, but you'll see as you dim those lights the outside world really comes to life.
So I was just flying along here, kind of dimming them progressively as my eyes are adjusting
to their night adaptation, and to the extent that I can see everything in the cockpit I'm
going to dim the lights as much as possible.
Also remember that ForeFlight has this extra dimmer here – so sometimes glass panel airplanes
can cast so much light inside the airplane, so with ForeFlight, you can dim it on the
iPad but you can also use this little button here to do some extra dimming and get that
iPad as low as you need to get it, so that it's not disrupting the way you see the world outside the airplane.
And the last thing is just remember to monitor the engine very very carefully.
Not like you don't in the daytime but at night it's extra important to stay aware of what's
happening with the engine, and to be vigilant about watching for emergency landing options
while you have some ambient light.
You still have the same options available you know as the daytime but once it gets dark
out there it can be really, really tough, so maybe you plan your route differently,
maybe you carry a little extra altitude.
You can see from this flight that I'm showing you that at night you really have to go for something dark.
You can't go for anything lit up like the streets all have cars and street lights and
signs and all of that. So you have to think ahead, plan accordingly.
And a lot of times, unfortunately, you're guessing.
And it's really important that you protect the people on the ground as well as the people in the airplane.
You know what's pretty, like just humbling to think about at night, especially over an area like this.
Here we are a thousand feet over Oakland.
This is not my favorite place to be because if something happened to the engine here we'd
have no choice but to go for something dark – a park, something like that.
I mean all the cars on the freeway like that we're liable to hit somebody and kill a kid or something.
It's not their problem down there, so we'd have to find a place to go where maybe it'd
be a little more risky for us, but just not have to live with hurting somebody else.
So if you freeze it here you can kind of see what I'm talking about.
There's just not too many options, I like the water right up here by Coast Guard Island,
but let me know in the comments below where you would go.
Alright you guys, but night flying is awesome, you can see how beautiful it was on this night
we were flying.
Hopefully those three tips inspire you to go out and get night current.
Enjoy this beautiful part of aviation.
And consider some of the things I was saying here about pre-flight planning, the phase
of the moon, the overcast, where you're going to be flying, making sure that you have flashlights
and other lighting inside the cockpit all set to go and that you're dimming it accordingly
and that you're staying vigilant about emergency landing options.
Alright aviators, that's all for this episode of the Finer Points, a huge thanks to the
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