Night flying: out of our element. Night flights are often some of the best a general aviation pilot can experience: traffic is light, controllers offer more shortcuts and the winds are usually calmer. Besides those practical matters, the view out the window is nothing short of spectacular, as even well- known sights take on a whole new look after sunset. But as much as we romanticize night flight, it’s not something most pilots do very often. I’m a perfect example: in my 2. Except for freight dogs, my guess is most GA pilots are in the same boat. Night flying is foreign territory. Flying Dreams Up.Up.and Away! How wonderful is it when you experience flying dreams! The immense sense of freedom and confidence is something I have never experienced when I am awake. With flying dreams you can escape from. The NTSB reports back this up. The overall accident rate is worse at night, whether in VMC or IMC, and night crashes are significantly more likely to be fatal. The causes are familiar. While many pilots worry about flying behind a single piston engine after dark, the statistics show that true mechanical failures are rare at night, just as they are during the day. As usual, the most likely suspect is the person in the left seat. Night flying, like instrument flying, demands the best from us. With that in mind, let’s consider some of the most important issues we must confront to stay safe in the dark. Terrain. Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) is obviously a concern during the day as well as the night, but it’s a perfect example of how margins get eroded at night. That mountain or tower that seems so obvious during the day can quickly disappear into the black after sunset, even with appropriate lighting. Avoiding those means maintaining good situational awareness, for sure. It also means never descending to a lower altitude unless you’re absolutely positive of your position–altitude is your friend at night. Any pilot can fly with terrain and obstacle alerts – even on an i. Pad. These days, there’s also no excuse for flying without a terrain alerting system, whether it’s a fancy TAWS system in the panel or a $7. Pad app. These are much more than eye candy. Even the most basic terrain system is a major safety enhancement, and most include obstacles too.
Just make sure you know how to use these terrain alerting features, lest they lull you into a false sense of security. That terrain map also doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to plan your flight. A classic trap involves VFR descents in mountainous terrain: the pilot sees the destination airport from cruise altitude and starts down, but suddenly loses sight of the airport. Before the pilot realizes what is blocking the airport, the flight ends in tragedy as the airplane crashes into the ridge that was hiding in the dark. At night, it’s not over until the airplane is in the hangar. At the very least, a minor diversion to keep you over a highway instead of high terrain is probably a good tradeoff. But the best answer for VFR pilots is to fly like you’re IFR. That certainly doesn’t mean you should fly in clouds or file an IFR flight plan, but it does mean you can learn from the published IFR procedures. Study obstacle departure procedures for your area or look up the minimum en route altitudes (MEAs) or the . These altitudes and routes are developed after careful study, and if the instrument approach procedure says “no circling northwest at night,” there’s probably a very good reason for it. Again, technology makes it easier to do this. With flight planning websites and apps, even VFR pilots can view instrument charts for no additional charge, so there’s no reason not to include them in your pre- flight planning. Spend an hour with a flight instructor to make sure you know what you’re looking at. Eventually you have to give up that precious altitude, and it’s best not to guess. Plan your vertical profile as carefully as you plan your flight plan route, including a top of descent point. You can even use your GPS’s VNAV feature to fly a pre- determined descent that you know is safe. On approach, you might also consider flying an ILS glideslope if you’re VFR. It can be a nice double- check for your visual approach, but be sure to practice this in daylight before you try it out for real. ILS or not, do fly the VASI and do not accept any deviations below red over white. For instrument pilots. That’s part of the safety you add by flying in the system. However, there are two moments when even pilots on an IFR flight plan are on their own: when departing uncontrolled airports and again at the end of an instrument approach. In the first scenario, paranoia is warranted: you are on your own for terrain avoidance until that controller wraps you in the warm embrace of ATC services (specifically, a vector; “radar contact” is not enough). Do not take off and turn directly to your first fix unless you know you will clear all obstructions. The smart move is to fly the published obstacle departure procedure (if one exists) or even circle over the airport until you reach a safe altitude.? Best do some research to make sure. On approach, route and altitude is described in exquisite detail–until, somewhat inexplicably, you get close to the ground. When you hit minimums and see the runway, all you have to do is descend and land, right? A critical detail to consider is the type of approach minimums for the one you’re flying: a Minimum Descent Altitude (MDA) on a non- precision approach or a Decision Altitude (DA) on a precision approach. If you look up at DA and see the lights, land. As we’ve discussed before, advisory GPS glideslopes do not guarantee obstruction clearance below MDA, but it can be tempting to keep flying that magenta line. Here’s another instance where it pays to have a plan–getting from MDA to the runway safely may mean leveling off for quite some time. One final consideration for IFR pilots. Night circling approaches have a reputation for being a death trap, and it’s mostly deserved. Unless you’re in flat terrain and you know the airport extremely well, there’s simply no reason to circle at night. I may be wrong, but it sounds like you are describing something I experience quite regularly. I am very nearly asleep but all of a sudden my whole body jerks and I am awake again! It feels exactly like I have. For almost every piston airplane, it’s far better to land with a tailwind than to circle. Spatial Disorientation. Another concern after sunset is losing sight of the horizon and losing control of the airplane. The answer is to file IFR if you’re rated, and to invest in good instrument training even if you’re not. A few hours under the hood can give you more confidence in your instruments and make your night flying safer. Practice certainly makes a difference, and that means more than just three takeoffs and landings. Conditions also play a big role, none bigger than the moon. While it might seem overkill, checking the phase of the moon during preflight is 9. The difference between a full moon and a new moon is dramatic–and worth experiencing with another pilot in the right seat if you haven’t seen it. Besides the phase of the moon, consider the effect of weather. While everyone worries about low clouds, even a 2. Consider the well- known case of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who crashed into Rhode Island Sound trying to get to Martha’s Vineyard. While much was made of the marginal visibility that night, the most significant risk factor was certainly the overwater leg of the flight. At night, over open water, the visual clues are. I fly into Cincinnati Lunken Airport (LUK) quite a bit, and on final approach for runway 2. L it’s as if you’re in a black hole. While there’s no water, the unpopulated farmland makes it nearly impossible to judge airplane height visually. So once again consider that route. Just as it builds in some margins for avoiding terrain, flying over a populated area or well- lit highway–even if it’s a little out of the way–can decrease the chances of spatial disorientation. One final subject always comes up when pilots talk about spatial disorientation at night: the autopilot. In my opinion, there’s little to debate. While “real men” may hand fly the airplane at night, smart ones who want to stay alive use the autopilot. Certainly, an autopilot should not be used as a crutch or an excuse for poor stick and rudder skills. But a properly maintained autopilot is undoubtedly a safety enhancement, especially for a VFR pilot who momentarily loses sight of the horizon. Weather. Dealing with weather can be a serious challenge for pilots at night, and if the accident statistics are to be believed, it is the single most significant factor in general aviation accidents at night. That’s because it impacts so many other risks, from terrain to spatial disorientation. For VFR pilots, dealing with weather at night is mostly a matter of being able to see clouds well enough to avoid them. The fact that the FARs require higher weather minimums at night is a good clue that you should be more pessimistic about weather. In particular, visibility is a place to be conservative. A full moon can make a huge difference for VFR flying – just make sure clouds won’t block it. That doesn’t mean the answer is to cancel every flight. It does argue for knowing the air mass you’re flying in, and understanding the big picture. If those cloud bases are flat and there’s no precipitation to bring down visibility, a night VFR flight under an overcast can be perfectly safe. Be sure to understand not only the current weather but also the trend: flying into worsening weather at night is a recipe for disaster. While it may sound like scud running, planning your night VFR flight to jump from airport to airport is a good tactic. This is not an excuse to fly in bad weather, it’s simply a way to give yourself an out at multiple points during your flight. The reality is, landing at an airport just behind you is a much safer move than turning around and flying all the way back to your departure airport–especially at night. Even if you’re IFR, darkness adds challenges. As I’ve written before, visually avoiding convective weather is still the most effective way to stay safe–no matter what airplane you’re flying. While you might be able to avoid the red cells with datalink weather, you may not miss the turbulence in the surrounding clouds. Lucid dreaming increases mindfulness and reduces nightmaressharepinemail. As a child, Beverly D. They scared her and she wanted them to stop, so she simply decided to ask the witches to leave her alone. The next time she slipped into the nightmare, she looked the witches in the eyes, and said . From then on, she could enjoy her dreams. Studies like that proved that people could lucid dream. But what is it and can anyone do it? Seeing an imaginary world and people and objects and yet as you are seeing them, to know this is dreaming; . It is so unbelievable that you realize in your dream, . Raj Dasgupta, an assistant professor of clinical medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and a fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Experienced lucid dreamers remain asleep and continue to fly or hash things out with grandma. But experts believe people can learn to increase their lucid dreams by repeating these practices. Record all dreams you remember. If you wake in the middle of the night during a dream, write it down. Write down everything you recall when first waking. While dreaming, do reality checks. Look for something that will signal that you. Many people cannot read or understand clocks in dreams; not being able to read the clock signals you. A pilot study showed that five people who practiced squats in a dream experienced increased heart rate as if they were physically active. Barrett recommends dream incubation, where people focus on a problem before bed so they grapple with it during the night.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |