Tonight was my first attempt at flying at night. Many countries prohibit pilots from flying at night without instrument ratings, but not only is the United States not one of those countries, they require you to do 3 hours of dual training at night to receive your private pilots certificate. Tonight was some maneuvers work over the lake (read: black, super dark — it’s a new moon right now), followed by a bunch of pattern work, as I need 10 landings for my certificate.

The weather was beautiful – temperature was hovering around 50 degrees, light winds on the surface, clear skies, and no moon. Got there a bit before 7:30 so I could preflight with some light, then waiting for it to get dark. Another quick preflight before we took off and we were almost ready to roll. Then came problem 1 – our landing light and starboard nav light were both out. The plane had just been in for its 100 hour overhaul, so it was probably ground connections working their way loose. Bob (the owner) was out, and figured out where the wires were loose. So in the plane we go – a little late, but no problems. Off we go to taxi to 17 and the landing light starts flashing on us. This isn’t so good, so back to the ramp we go. Bob thankfully is still there and has a spare bulb, so a quick bulb change and we were off (with a much brighter landing light — Woo!). That was the last of our issues for the night, and not a big deal, but it did mean that we didn’t get off the ground until 9:00.

Maneuvers over the lake went well enough, and it was amazing to see how the darkness eliminates any horizon at night. Lots of talk between Willis and I about emergency landing strategies at night. Not nearly as easy as during the day, since you 1) don’t know where the ground is exactly and 2) can’t see what’s down there. After some fairly reasonable maneuvers, back to the pattern we went. Landings were all fairly reasonable. I was slowing up too much on approach – need to work on that some more. There was almost no surface wind, so we ran approaches into all 4 runways, which was nice. Of course, I had never made an approach onto 6 in the daytime, so that was a bit entertaining. Blew one approach into 24 because I didn’t run downwind long enough, had a short base, and was way too high on final. Since aborting with 40 flap towards the west is a bad idea with the hill at the end of the runway, I aborted early and did a quick trip around the pattern rather than try to save the landing. One of the landings onto 17 was without cabin lights, which was a little freaky at first, but nothing too bad. Interesting flying at night with no instruments and no light other than the radio numbers in the cabin. The next landing was without cabin or landing light, which was even more interesting, since you had to judge based on runway lights how far off the ground you are. It’s not bad on 17, since you can float a *long* way in a C-150 and still be ok, but it would suck on a short runway.

Definitely learned a lot tonight and can’t wait until I get to do my night cross-country. I hope the skies are clear on Monday!