SPOOKED ABOUT NIGHT FLYING IN SINGLES? ...

Acknowledgements: AIR FACTS/Richard Collins

(Ed. Note: The following is a summary of the full article)

“.... If not, maybe you should be .... My stock answer to this is simple: If you are not comfortable with it, don’t do it. The fatal accident rate at night is higher than in the daytime, and it is even worse for night IFR in IMC flying. Any way you look at it, night flying can be labelled as hazardous.

Why?

·      When the accident record is examined, there are few night accidents related to the mechanical failure of the engine in a single.

·      There are more night accidents related to fuel system mismanagement or fuel exhaustion. The fuel business is in the hands of the pilot. The mechanical business is not.

·      Pilots who mismanage or run out of fuel do a worse job of forced landings than do pilots whose engine rattles and quits. This could be related to a period of stress before the event. Trying to stretch gas is a stressful exercise and when the silence finally comes the pilot might already be rattled.

·      Whatever the cause of the engine failure and however dark the night or bad the weather, a pilot who has always flown with a plan on how to handle this, and who keeps cool and keeps flying until the accident sequence begins, always has a chance.

I’ll offer a case report as an illustration:

·      After flying for six hours, the pilot arrived at Pensacola, where it was dark, and the weather was low. After six hours there would not be much fuel left, certainly not enough to feel comfortable about an approach to minimums with the possibility of a trip to an alternate if the approach wasn’t successful.

·      The pilot’s approach was not successful. He made two missed approaches and then felt sure he didn’t have enough fuel to make it to his filed alternate. The controller suggested a closer airport and the pilot headed there.

·      Soon though, the engine quit. The night was dark, and the pilot said he could not see any terrain features below him.

·      He pulled the prop control out to minimize drag. He set up a 90-knot glide, saw trees with the aid of the landing light, and maintained control until the trees took over. He obviously implemented a plan.

·      The airplane stopped nose down in a deep wooded area. According to the NTSB, of the four on board one suffered serious injuries and the other three minor or no injuries.

The reason this accident is a good example is that, after making a lot of mistakes and flying the airplane to the point of fuel exhaustion, the pilot was able to make a survivable forced landing in woods at night. The key was in maintaining control until the accident sequence started:

·      At night, it’s much harder to determine when to break out on an instrument approach.

·      In the daytime it is easy to know when you have flown into visual conditions on most approaches.

·      At night, approaches are best flown using the information on the panel until reaching minimums for the approach and then the runway threshold. That means having the minimum altitude firmly in mind until passing the point where you no longer need it.

·      There is a higher likelihood of a missed approach at night, and you don’t want to fly into this with a blank mind.

·      Not only must the missed approach procedure be flown, but the answer to the question about what happens next had best already be in mind. All that is harder to sort out from scratch and in the dark!”

FLY SAFE!