Night flying is tricky enough when we’re current. Don’t mix in little recent experience and complacency.

By Joseph E. (Jeb) Burnside

These pages often explore the differences between flying during the day and at night. We’ve also been repeat offenders when it comes to emphasizing recent experience with a proposed operation and cautioning about allowing a four- or five-digit number of flight hours cloud our judgment. Despite our wishes to the contrary, it’s all too frequent when a single event highlights all three of these accident-causing factors.

At night, of course, the eye can play various tricks on us. These include false depth perception and autokinesis, where a stationary light appears to move. But even more universal and insidious is our frequent inability to discern the natural horizon at night. Put another…