First Night Flight at Ryan Says…

Today I went on my first cross-country night flight with Andy (my flight instructor). What an experience!

After successfully passing my solo checkride yesterday, I was in the mood to try something new. The weather was looking good in the afternoon, so I gave Andy a call and asked if we could fly tonight. He was up for it and I met him at Livermore Airport (LVK) at 7:30 for a quick pre-flight discussion. We took off about 8pm with Vicki in the back seat to enjoy the scenery.

Our destination was Sacramento Executive Airport (SAC) which is a few miles south of Sacramento Internaional, and not as crowded. Here are some enroute pictures:

I literally felt like I was learning to fly all over again - with what felts like hundreds of things to concentrate on at the same time, and barely being able to keep up. That’s exactly how I felt when I first began to fly, although now that I’m almost solo I feel like I have it almost under control - at least in the daylight!

I guess I really jumped in the deep end though - it was only the second time I had taken off from Livermore, and I had never been to Sacramento before! If you think finding an airport in the daylight is hard, try finding it at night. Luckily our Cessna 172sp is equipped with the latest in navigation technology (Garmin G1000) - the plane is literally a few months old. The GPS and moving map helped a lot, although as part of the exercise Andy made me navigate visually by using my sectional chart and looking for landmarks outside (it’s very easy to spot towns at night, but hard to find other visual checkpoints). To help, I also locked on the Sacramento VOR.

I managed to navigate there pretty well and found the airport quickly (which I think was mostly luck). I used the autopilot a little bit to give me time to examine my charts and enjoy the view. Luckily the tower was still open when we arrived (they close at 9pm, we made it by around 20 mins). I contacted the tower about 20 miles out and was cleared for left traffic on runway 20 (the main and longest runway - there are also two that cross it). My pattern wasn’t the best, I started downwind pretty close to the runway but was blown even closer by the wind and didn’t really notice until I turned base and really overshot my turn to final. After I lined us up, final approach was pretty nice. I basically stayed on the lights with good airspeed. Everything was going great, I rounded off and flared nicely and thought it would be a perfect touchdown, until I suddently sank a few feet and landed with a plonk. I misjudged our height above the runway - Andy said that was common given this was my first night landing.

We taxied back to runway 20 for takeoff with the help of an airport map I printed out that afternoon at work (luckily - even Andy seemed a little confused about where to taxi at first). Takeoff was pretty smooth and we set a GPS flight plan for Tracy then Livermore. I set the autopilot to climb to 6,500 feet and to follow the flight plan so I could sit back and again enjoy the view. It wasn’t all fun and games though - Andy had me practicing spotting airports, which is incredibly difficult. We would look at the GPS to find the nearest airport, then look out the window to try and spot it (you can usually see a flashing beacon). I wasn’t very successful here, and the only one I managed to spot was Tracy because the autopilot was taking us directly towards it.

We disengaged the autopilot before we hit tracy and descended for a straight in approach to runway 25R at Livermore. The tower had closed so we self-announced on the CTAF (common traffic advisory frequency). There was plane in the pattern practicing night landings, and a few other planes and a chopper around, but they didn’t cause any problems. Unfortunately my landing was even worse this time. Not wanting to make the same mistake as last time I didn’t flare as much, which wouldn’t have been so bad but I let the nose wheel down a bit too early and we landed hard and bounced. Still, as Andy said, it’s like learning to land all over again because things look very different at night.

We taxied back to parking, secured the plane and I drove back to Palo Alto.

All up it was a pretty stressful flight. I learnt just how hard it can be to navigate at night when you don’t know where you are going. It is a great experience to have under my belt though. I expect many students do their night cross country flights to airports that they are already familiar with. I like discovering how hard flying can be, because it gives me a challenge and something to work towards. When I get my private pilot license I’m sure there will be times when I will fly to unfamiliar airports at night, and so I want to log as many practice hours as I can with Andy sitting next to me to bail me out if I need help.

Next on my flying agenda is my first solo! It will be a supervised solo with some pattern work at Palo Alto and 3 solo landings. I’ll be sure to report on how it goes.