Night Flight or Night Fright

I arranged for a night flight tonight to conclude the remainder of my required night takeoffs and landings. While I expected a few circuits around the traffic pattern, my instructor had different ideas. Once we took off it was instrument flight time. On went the "foggles" and for the next hour I flew on instruments only. In addition to VOR navigation, turns, climbs, and descents, we tried some other interesting tricks. Steep turns "under the hood" was on the agenda. They were difficult.

The most challenging and frightening trick of the night was, "recovery from unusual attitudes."

This is performed "under the hood." First you turn over the plane to the instructor. Next you close your eyes and put your chin down to your chest. Once you've done that your instructor proceeds to fly the airplane like you're on a roller coaster. After about 20 seconds of this you are told to recover. You open your eyes, with the foggles on so you only see the instruments, and then decide how to get yourself straight and level as all the gauges move every which way. You need to decide quickly though because things start to unravel fast. I needed to do what I was doing faster and at one point I pulled the power off when I needed to add power to keep from stalling. Another time and I watched the airspeed climb into the caution range before I was able to regain positive control.

After that we ran an simulated Airport Surveillance Radar approach where my instructor pretended to be the radar controller. On certain airports the controllers can guide you to the runway by using radar vectors. My instructor brought me to a final approach at about 600 ft MSL and then had me remove my foggles and make a landing. That was actually the funnest thing I did all night because I was able to fly on instruments right over to the runway. After the landing we did three more in the pattern and called it a night. Night landings are a lot harder than they look and mine were only acceptable. I had one with a pretty good bounce before I got down.

My instructor did say that my flying had improved, however.