Developing Your Night Flight Plan
A Guide to Avoid Things That Go Bump in the Night
Article and photos by William E. Dubois, FAA Guest Author
Night flight is wonderful. It offers the beauty of sparkling carpets of city lights and moon-drenched landscapes, calm air, tame weather, uncrowded skies, and light radio traffic.
But — perhaps — danger lurks in the darkness, just over the horizon.
The AOPA Air Safety Institute’s Night Flying Accident Analysis Report found that while night flight makes up a relatively small percent of total general aviation (GA) accidents — about 7% — they are disproportionately fatal, accounting for 16% of all fatal GA accidents. Worth considering, when absorbing this statistic, is that those numbers aren’t adjusted for the fact that a lot less GA flying — only 8 to 10% historically — occurs at night. The bottom line is that night flight has the potential to be considerably more hazardous than the numbers suggest at first glance.
In the grim list of accident causes detailed in the report, controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) comes in at fifth place among the 27 causes of night accidents and is notable for being the most fatal defined type of night accident — only being outstripped in un-survivability by the “unknown cause” category. Night CFIT numbers are a big enough concern to the NTSB that they issued a safety alert (SA-013 (PDF download)) over the issue in 2008 and updated it again in 2015. The alert, Flight Into Terrain in Visual Conditions features a flaming red subhead that reads: “Nighttime Visual Flight Operations are Resulting in Avoidable Accidents.”
While certainly sobering on one hand, the positive takeaway is that these accidents are deemed avoidable, and there are a number of steps you can take — both before and during night flight — to dramatically reduce your personal risk and avoid becoming a statistic.
Preflight
The NTSB’s safety alert states that CFIT accidents can best be avoided in the preflight phase of flight. With that in mind, how can you enhance your pre-night preflight for maximum CFIT avoidance?
Preflight Altitude Selection
When it comes to avoiding controlled flight into terrain, the first step is to recognize that you may or may not be able to see all of the terrain you want to avoid. Your top priority for a safe night flight is to choose an enroute altitude well above anything that you might smack into in the dark. This includes terrain, wind farms, and cell phone towers. Check the blue maximum elevation figures (MEFs) for each quad — and adjacent quad — of the chart along your route and select an altitude high enough to ensure comfortable clearance above those numbers. That will take care of most enroute CFIT risk, assuming you fly with even modest skill when it comes to staying on course and on altitude.
But while you’re looking at the chart, take the time to really study the terrain features along your route. What type of terrain are you flying over? What is on either side of your course? Be especially alert to hills or other features that rise significantly above the average terrain and be on the lookout for the blue “Eiffel Tower” icons that indicate obstacles that rise 1,000 feet above ground level. Some of the tallest cell towers can top 2,000 feet. Altitude, always the pilot’s friend, is even more so when the terrain is cloaked in a coat of darkness, so give yourself plenty of it.
Preflight Route Considerations
Also, take a look at the distribution of cities along your route. The “yellow zones” around cities and towns on the chart are not the imprint of city lights but are instead the visual outline of development around a populated area — the footprint of human activity on the natural terrain. Still, these markings can be used as proxies to indicate areas of considerable ground lighting and the accompanying night horizon-identification factor that a well-lit ground environment provides. On the other hand, in chart areas more devoid of development markings, consider that ground lights may be sparse, and maintaining a visual reference to the horizon may be difficult, or on non-moonlit nights, impossible.
Night visual flight rules (VFR) flights over rural areas can be considered an exercise in maintaining control by reference to instruments. If your comfort in panel-based orientation is less than 100%, consider charting a pilotage course across rural areas that follows major highways instead of a direct-course magenta line across the countryside.
Preflight Thinking About Airports
Take the time to carefully study the approach paths to all runways at your destination and alternate, with an eye toward terrain and obstacle issues that could provide a hazard to flight if invisible or obscured by darkness on approach. And, while you are studying the airport environments, grab the Chart Supplement and ensure that fuel is readily available after hours at any planned refueling stop.
Preflight Nocturnal Weather Briefing
Moving from route planning to weather briefing, your weather check should include both the phase of the moon (the more moon the better if flying over rural areas) and the presence of high-altitude cloud cover. While we might normally ignore a ceiling well above our flight altitude, when it comes to night flight, a high ceiling can block out moonlight as effectively as closing blackout curtains at home to silence an annoying streetlight.
Finally, when checking Notices to Air Missions (NOTAMS) for day flights, we tend to tune out the plethora of “obstacle tower light out of service” alerts — but now those should be of the keenest interest to you.
Departure
You can maximize safety on departure by treating a night takeoff as a quasi-instrument maneuver. Expect to be more “head down” than during a normal daylight takeoff. And even if not instrument rated, with proper knowledge and training, you can steal some moves from the instrument pilot’s playbook. Take a look at the instrument departures for your airport to see how instrument traffic would be safely routed up, out, and away from the airport. How does your departure plan compare? Simply taking off and proceeding on course like in the daytime may not be the safest departure.
Enroute
It’s back to basics for the enroute segment at night. Ensure you update your altimeter for local pressure frequently as you travel across the dark landscape to ensure your altitude is actually what you think it is. And challenge yourself to maintain that altitude — and heading — with good ol’ fashioned military precision, if you can. If you are receiving VFR radar services, a.k.a. “flight following,” remember that the radar is designed for traffic, so don’t count on air traffic control (ATC) to let you know that you are about to smack into a grove of tall trees atop a hill.
Approach and Arrival
Any night arrival requires strong airmanship with enhanced altitude precision, especially in the approach to landing phase. When in doubt, assuming the runway length is sufficient, stay high and land long.
If you are flying on an instrument flight plan, recall that while your approach keeps you clear of obstacles and terrain until minimum descent altitude (MDA) or decision altitude (DA) — after that, all bets are off. As designed, you are supposed to continue to the touchdown visually after MDA or DA. Popping out of the clouds and having a clear sight picture in daylight is all good and fine but consider that at night — even without clouds — there can easily be invisible terrain or obstacles nearby. Continuing nonchalantly down a darkened glide slope is not a guarantee of obstacle clearance.
Night Proficiency
While you could, in theory, do an entire course of training for a private pilot certificate at night (there is no day flight requirement in the regs), most pilots in training only rack up the required minimum of three hours, and many flight schools combine those hours with the required “hood” time (foggles to you younger pilots), meaning that many trainees are never really exposed to proper VFR night flight. On top of that, most GA pilots don’t fly at night that often.
Speaking of the hood, as there are a host of night illusions that put night fliers at risk of spatial disorientation (see “Your Senses in the Shadows: Nighttime Visual Illusions and Spatial Disorientation” in this issue), some regularly scheduled sessions under the hood with a flight instructor is a valuable investment. Many countries require a night endorsement with more robust training for night flight, so why not create your own as a personal minimum?
And ironically, as the “runway lights” do nothing to light the runway, but rather illuminate its outline so we can visually judge our approach height and angle, it just feels a lot different landing at night. If you’re flying solo, there’s no night proficiency requirement. But if it has been a while, it’s a good idea to go up with an instructor or night-current safety pilot and get in some local practice before a night cross-country flight.
Gadgetry
Today’s pilot has a huge situational awareness advantage over pilots of previous generations. Any tablet computer, running an app that costs less per year than one hour of flight time, has a major feature that can enhance night safety when properly used: alerts related to terrain and obstacles. Of course, these are only useful when both properly understood and activated. The second major feature many apps boast deserves a word of caution, and that is “synthetic vision.” Synthetic vision appears to act similar to night vision goggles, but it is not at all the same, so don’t you dare fly it that way. It’s all computer modeling based on GPS location and stored databases. And trees, you know, grow.
Still, synthetic vision and terrain and obstacle alert features, while not primary flight tools, are useful enhancers of situational awareness and great resources for added safety.
Boot up the Night
Speaking of tech, even the most modest flight simulators can be used in night mode. Close the curtains, turn off the overhead lights, and practice some night approaches into challenging airports — you know, the ones in the mountains or surrounded by trees.
The “V” in VFR
Consider that the “V” in VFR stands for visual, but night limits our vision in multiple ways. Our eyes shift from cone-mode to rod-mode, our central blind spot expands, and our brains are capable of manufacturing all manner of visual illusions to compensate for our lack of visual acuity.
Meanwhile, VFR flying is more heavily reliant on being able to see than most pilots appreciate.
The key, beyond intelligent flight planning for night factors, is to fly fully aware of your night-imposed visual limitations. Rely more heavily on your instruments than you do during the day, and program your mind to let the instruments rule the night — should your eyes and your instruments disagree.
Oh, and speaking of the rods, those little suckers are absolute oxygen hogs due to their high metabolic rate at night, the primary reason that the FAA recommends the use of supplemental oxygen at night at altitudes above 5,000 feet mean sea level (Airplane Flying Handbook).
Human Factors, Night Edition
And finally, don’t underestimate the corrosive effect of fatigue on both fine motor skills and mental processing speed. If you are tired, you won’t fly as well as when you are well-rested and your mind will take longer to figure things out. Descending from cruise at night, the airport in sight suddenly flickers and winks out. How long will it take your tired brain to process the fact that something solid is now between you and a safe landing?
Many night GA flights follow a “normal” workday, and while this may be unavoidable, a good mitigation is to schedule a preflight cat nap. It will be considerably more effective than coffee, an energy drink, or a caffeinated soda; any one of which — all being diuretics — can trigger another unwelcome human factor that can add to night stress.
Wrap Up
Still, there’s no reason not to enjoy the calm beauty of the night. It’s a fine time to fly. It simply requires a bit more focus on preflight, a change in some day-habit procedures, increased awareness of your physical condition and limitations, and attention to precise flying.
Be sure to rely heavily on your instruments for departure, fly with precision enroute, and maximize situational awareness on arrival. Deploy your gadgets and work on your night proficiency training in an airplane and simulators. Finally, always be alert to the fact that while humans are not naturally nocturnal, with the right tools and precautions, we can indeed master the night.
William E. Dubois is the ground school program manager for Infinity Flight Group and a widely published aviation writer. He holds a ground instructor certificate with all ratings, a commercial pilot certificate with instrument rating, and is a dual-accredited Master Ground Instructor. He loves night flight.
