March 16, 2004
Night Ops
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I knocked out 8 takeoffs and landings tonight. It was very cool, but as I said to my CFI:
"That was fun. I'm just glad I know where the airport is."
I could see if being very tricky to pick out an airport in the sea of lights that makes up the scenery around here. Especially since the lights at Campbell (C81) are so dim. Although I bet airports with pilot controlled lighting (PCL) are a lot easier to spot. PCL is a system where pilots can turn on and change the intensity of airport lights by clicking the microphone while the radio is tuned to a specific frequency.
I did the landings both with and without the landing lights on. I've heard and read a lot about how hard it is to adjust to the different sight picture at night and the tendency is to flare too early on the landing and drop onto the runway. Luckily, I didn't have that problem, which may just mean I usually flare too late. Out of the eight landings, about 5 of them were near-perfect - or as we pilots like to say, "greasers." On one landing, I did flare a little too soon, but it wasn't due to me misinterpreting the sight picture. For some reason, I was just really jerky when I pulled back on the yoke instead of applying pressure gradually. I ballooned a bit and had to make some adjustments to eventually land a little heavy.
An interesting thing happened on my first two landings of the night. On both of them, just a few feet above the ground, I started to drift to the left off the centerline of the runway. At first I was very puzzled because the wind was a little shifty, but was pretty much straight down Runway 9. After the second time, though, I realized my problem. My seat was sitting lower than I was used to it being. As I was pulling the yoke back in the usual way, I must have also been pulling the left side down a bit. After a quick seat adjustment, the centerline stayed where I put it. Lesson learned: make seat adjustment part of the preflight checklist!
Although I didn't have any problems with illusions on short final, I did notice some other depth perception inconsistencies. It seemed that close things looked further away than they really were (I executed a few of my turns too soon because I thought I was further along), but far things seemed closer (the town of Grayslake looks like it's WAY over yonder during the day - at night, it looked to be spittin' distance).
But I am happy to confirm - the plane flies the same - light or dark.
