Page 21 - June 2015 Volume 19 Number 6

my vision had deteriorated and I was wearing “corrective lenses” for distance vision. My instructor was from San Diego, so our night cross-country in the T-37 was from Phoenix to southern California. The T-37 cockpit lighting was quite poor and wearing glasses was disorienting. I was accustomed to them when the next phase of training in the T-38 arrived, making it less of a burden. In the F-16, we flew mostly during the day and our attention was directed at the HUD and outside of the jet. At night, along with the other nighttime visual perception considerations, there were issues with the air-to- air radar reflecting on the canopy. Other than that, visibility and night switchology was outstanding.
Not that the visibility out the pointy end of an airliner is poor, but it’s very different from the visibility in a fighter and it’s worse than many GA airplanes. Once away from the ground in the MD-80, looking outside is secondary to monitoring the ten- thousand gauges in the cockpit of this legacy (an affectionate way of saying older) airliner. Fortunately, the cockpits of most T&T airplanes are modern, well-lighted and have instrument clusters combined or arranged very logically; similar to a
“modern” airliner. Even so, we face issues at night.
OldFriend
Having spent about 3,500 hours flying at night, the Boogie Man and I are old friends – though
the affiliation was not always harmonious. I’ve had to land on an unlighted runway, I missed a taxiway at a tiny GA airport in the middle of the night, due to inop landing and taxi lights, and I got the nose stuck in soft ground. I have flown into a small, but towering, cumulus illuminated only by moonlight, had St Elmo’s fire so thick I couldn’t see through it and had a cloud-to-aircraft lightning strike in which a compression shock wave blew out the right motor. That’s why some of the lights in the cockpit are labeled as thunderstorm lights, by the way. Not to keep from blowing out your motors; you turn them on and they illuminate the cockpit so as to lessen the effects of lightning flashes on our night vision. This allows us to see controls and switches after the flash, while we catch our breath or clean our shorts. Perhaps we should rename them “time-to-land” switches – if we need to use thunderstorm lights, we might rather be on the ground than in the air. Although, the most difficult portion of a night trip can be when we’re on the ground, taxiing on large or unfamiliar airports. This is especially true during low visibility or when surfaces are wet and dark. Painted lines become invisible, making turns on a poorly-lighted taxiway difficult, and extra care must be taken to avoid incursions; all good reasons to slow our pace at night.
It can be enjoyable to depart in the pre-dawn darkness, on the front side of our circadian rhythm, knowing that the sun will rise soon. But an evening departure in which the sun has set, not to be seen for the duration of our flight and leaving us entering the back side of our clock, can be unsettling and present more risk if not prepared. The disadvantages of fatigue, loss of visual clues, and unfamiliarity with both the controls and suitability of artificial lighting, can become an overload if weather, low fuel or
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