=============================================================================== LOG ENTRY - 15-FEB-2012 Matt Borland Flight: 36 - 15-FEB-2012 - 0.9 hr - Night flight Depart: KCOS ~1850 -> Arrive: KCOS ~1944 =============================================================================== Tonight I became one of those little lights that buzzes about the night sky. It's a requirement for your pilot license that you have ten night landings and three hours of night flying. For the purposes of training, night is considered to be one hour after sunset, so I scheduled this session to start around 6:30, so we could be taking off around 6:50. Around 6:15 I did my preflight in the sub-freezing temperature, with only the dim lights of the airport and my flashlight to see what I was doing...this made me feel like a safe-cracker. It's best to use red lights so that your eyes can remain acclimated to the darkness, but all I had was my uber-bright LED flashlight. After getting back to the hangar for a few moments to warm up, my instructor and I returned to the plane. I had to give the engine a couple shots of the manual primer due to the cold, and once I did it started right up. I dangled my flashlight from my jacket zipper so I could go through my checklist, and turned on the interior lighting...a very dim but adjustable overhead red light. My instructor wore a headlamp that could swap between red and white light...I'll have to get one of those. To taxi, I turned on the taxi lights, which are on a knob with three positions: in (off), one notch out (taxi lights), and two notches out (landing lights). The lights in the T-41C are positioned on the left wing but are angled a little to center on the taxiway in front of you. The cabin quickly warmed up as we taxied out to runway 17R. Traffic around the airport was pretty quiet, so in a few moments we were off into the black. My first impression was that this wasn't immediately much different from daytime flight...I had to still stay in the airport traffic pattern, so I was still checking the same controls and performing the same maneuvers as before. But once I was straight and level in my downwind leg (parallel to the runway) I could take in the view. To my left and ahead of me, the glistening sprawl of Colorado Springs; to my right, the darkness of the eastern plains; beneath, the geometrically precise colored dots of the airport's taxiways and runways...most notably the blues of the taxiway edges connecting dozens of paths and intersections. Airplane traffic around the city was very visible to me as bright points wandering about the horizon. I didn't have much time for sight-seeing though; my goal was to perform seven or eight landings, and I had to keep in the pattern as directed by the tower. On my first couple of landings I had to fight off what I felt was a pretty strong wind from the east, so strong I had to turn the yoke far to the left, but at the same time keep a very heavy right rudder to keep my nose centerline with the runway. (There are other ways to combat a crosswind, but this is the preferred method.) My instructor seemed very concerned because this is an uncoordinated situation, but I insisted that there was a pretty good crosswind out there. We did a wind check, which is just calling "wind check" into the tower, and they responded "zero eight zero at ten knots." This means a ten-knot wind from the east...so basically since we were landing directly to the south, this meant we had a 90 degree crosswind at the maximum allowed for student pilots. :P My instructor apologized for doubting my handling of the winds. For landing, you obviously turn on your landing lights. These make it easier for other planes to see you, but they also play the important role of being your headlights so you can see the runway once you're really close. To demonstrate a power-out situation, we did one landing without the landing lights, and although we could still do it (you just use the side lighting on the runway as a guide) it was a bit harder to see exactly where the centerline was, especially once we were landed and rolling along. After seven landings on runways 17L and 17R, we called in for a final landing on 13. This was a little less of a crosswind, and I did what is called a short-field landing...basically you come in a little slower and modify your aim point so that you land in a shorter distance. My instructor told me if I did it OK I should be able to turn at the Bravo 3 intersection, which is in the first quarter of the runway or so, and so I did as instructed and in a few minutes we made it back to the hangar. Tonight was pretty amazing, but I didn't really get much time to enjoy the strangeness and wonder of night flight. Next week I'm planning to do my night cross-country flight, a longer flight down to Lamar, about 120 miles each way into the eastern plains. THAT should be surreal...I'm looking forward to it!