In other words, I've now returned back to home from a five-day trip to Kuopio airport, where we had our night flying course. We were advised beforehands to shift our sleeping pattern because at Kuopio, the day would start at about nine o'clock in the evening and end at about four or five in the morning. We would be sleeping in a school apartment, which was located at the airport at less than a hundred meters from the apron.
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| Ready for taxi in to the darkness. |
The first night's program was to fly the two training area exercises combined into one flight and we were briefed thoroughly about minimum safe altitudes, the locations of the different training areas (only one plane in each of them, to avoid collisions at night), and safety precautions as well as operational procedures and differences in everyday flying-related tasks at night. We were allowed to use the briefing and flight preparation lounge of a local parachuting club and it was very cozy indeed.
It was a really nice and special feeling to take off for the first time at night. I had somehow in my mind associated night flying with the relaxing post-sunset twilight summer flying I'd done before but somehow the amount of darkness only really occurred to me after we started taxiing to the runway. It really was pitch-black and you could see nothing but darkness and the aerodrome lights. Also the flying felt like a combination of VFR- and instrument operation. We did some instrument turns, 30- and 45-degree turns, spiral dive recovery procedures, slow flying and stalls and then returned for landing.
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| The C152 cockpit at night. Only the VOR and ADF are actually lighted. The lightning for the rest of the instruments comes from a red light in the roof. |
Since there were a few signs of worse weather ahead, the second night was dedicated to cross-country flying, since it has the most restricting minimum weather. My cross-country flight was from Kuopio to Joensuu via a few enroute checkpoints and from there back to Kuopio. For the first time in a long time I actually took my time planning this short flight and calculated every useful VOR-radial and DME-distances for every checkpoint, thoroughly checked the MSA's and wrote notes to self about the different frequencies and tasks at every phase of the flight in order to ease my workload when actually airborne. The flight lasted a little less than two hours and had to be one of the most atmospheric flights I've ever flown. Night navigation was very interesting and challenging and somehow everything felt more epic than in daylight.
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| The route for my night navigation exercise. |
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| Flight planning and efforts to improve night vision ;) |
We only had traffic circuit exercises left for nights three and four, and since the weather stayed good we got to fly all of them in time. Normally, I've been getting a little bored of the traffic circuit flights at this point but these I looked very much forward into. We made some interesting landings with the Papi-lights off and simulating electrical failures by turning all the instrument and cockpit lights off.
After two flights with an instructor, it was my turn to go solo and fly five take off's and full stop landings at night in the traffic circuit. This solo flight was brief and ended before I got to think about what I was doing, so I didn't quite get into the "here I now am, flying at night" -feeling but all in all, it was memorable and fun.
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| On final runway 33. |
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| So now its actually dark. An approach with a simulated electrical malfunction. |
I'm very much looking forward to continuing night flying when I get my license!
PS. Starting monday next week, it's time to say farewell to active Cessna-flying and defect to the Piper-side of the single-engine piston fence :)
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