Without peripheral lighting at night, gauging altitude and attitude is more difficult. But that same lighting can present a false horizon. Trust your instruments.
There’s an old saying: “Night landings are just like in daytime, except you can’t see.” The thing is, humans were never meant to fly, much less at night. Our eyes aren’t good at gauging the distance to a light against a dark background, so it helps to have lights in your peripheral vision to aid in determining altitude. When the only light is a lit runway, you’re flying into a black hole.
On The Cover: This long-exposure image of a Tecnam P2006 shooting a touch-and-go night landing on Runway 27 at the U.K.’s Gloucestershire Airport (EGBJ) is a great example of what a runway looks like from the ground. It can be much less well-defined when trying to land on it, though. For more, see the article beginning on page 16. Image by Clint Budd.
Photo Credits: Clint Budd/Flickr
Near Hernandez, N.M., headed south, I noticed the moon rising to my left. It reminded me of Ansel Adams’s iconic 1941 photograph, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. I took out my phone and tried to snap a picture. My more artistic friends might be amused by the effort. Adams used a large-format camera with a very […]
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