Here in the Front Range, I see quite a few small planes flying at night low enough to be under the FAA ceiling for flight plans.* Without radar or high-powered headlights, how do they handle being around mountains? Seems to me it would be easy to accidentally burrow into a mountainside you didn’t see.
*Not really sure what it’s called. You know like when a small plane just wants to fly around a bit or hop over to another regional airport.
A flight plan is a written document describing your proposed flight. (Note: If you’re half an hour late arriving to your destination or forget to close your flight plan, they start looking for you.) Flight plans are not required for VMC (Visual Meteorological Conditions), even at night.
Presumably, most of the pilots are familiar with the area. The highest elevation of an obstruction in an area is printed on the sectional chart. (Example, 2,600 feet.) As long as you’re above that, you should miss them. In addition to the highest point, peaks and obstructions have their elevations printed next to them.
The only real “FAA ceiling for flight plans” is 18,000 ft (actually, FL180, which is almost but not quite the same). Above that, you are in Class A airspace: you must be on an IFR flight plan and in contact with ATC.
Below that you can be flying VFR: flight plans optional, no requirement to be in contact with ATC, you carry the full responsibility for avoiding mountains. This is not especially difficult, using such tools as charts, GPS navigation, etc.
FL = flight level
IFR = instrument flight rules
ATC = air traffic control
VFR = visual flight rules
Very carefully IMO.
A pilot that is familiar with the area can use lights on the ground as an easy reference to avoid mountains. Villages, towns, cities are a good visual map at night. You can just avoid the real darkness. You can see lights appear and disappear behind things. Even if you are not instrument rated or specifically using them, they can give you good positioning information.
Also, it is often not really that dark. Especially if your eyes have adjusted.
Why do people who think nothing of driving at night believe that flying a plane is so much more difficult?
Unless you are really in the middle of nowhere, there are roads, rivers, towers with lights. towns, etc. to be easily seen.
They don’t disappear when the sun goes down. Really. They don’t.
Between city/suburban lights and, presuming clear weather, moon and stars things are not entirely dark at night. Between that and navigational information (i.e. "maps) flying small planes in good weather in the mountains is quite doable and reasonably safe given a competent pilot.
It’s when the weather goes bad that it gets to be hazardous or even stupid.
That’s true if you are flying around in a densely populated area. As a night rated pilot up in Canada, it isn’t always that easy. You can fly in areas so sparsely populated that on a cloudy or moonless night you may have no ground reference at all and might as well be in IMC.
VFR mountain flying at night up here is not something I would choose to do.
Because it can be much more difficult to pick out cloud and once in cloud you may find yourself in a bit of trouble. Sure on a nice bright moonlit night it’s not much different from day time, but nights can be very dark.
As someone who does about 75% of my flying at night, I would not recommend night VFR regardless of what the rules may or may not allow you to do. Particularly if there is terrain around that you are not intimately familiar with.
Hey, what’s this mountain goat doing up here in a cloud bank?
Because you’re going considerably faster in a 3D environment with no markings and no headlights and the frequent equivalent of thick fog. Not many people encounter that when driving a car.
What others have said.
Night VFR *along *the Front Range over the flats when there are few to no clouds is pretty simple and safe. Night VFR amongst the mountains and passes is a great way to meet a sudden ending. As is night VFR if clouds are more than few and far between.
The car driving analogy is not helpful. Car drivers are relying on street lights and city glow for large-scale awareness of the path ahead, and headlights for the immediate obstacles. Out in the boonies with no street lights or city glow car drivers’ eyes have very poor dark adaptation; everything outside the headlights is pretty much flat invisible.
Conversely, night VFR pilots are relying on no headlights, good visual dark adaptation, and the distinctive differences between terrain, ground lights, and sky. Which can be plenty good enough, or nowhere near enough.
I recall in USAF we had a refueling area in southern Utah. There were no towns for 50-ish miles, just a few isolated ranches. On a hazy night the stars above and ground lights below were indistinguishable. I, and many others, have taken on fuel from tankers performing barrel rolls out there. Or so it seemed. Operating over the ocean can be similar.
I hear what the pilots are saying, and know it’s safe as safe can be, but Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT ) is still a leading cause of airplane accidents. It’s not exactly unheard of.
As to CFIT, it’s important to distinguish IMC from VMC and day from night. CFIT is one of the leading, if not the leading, cause of airliner mishaps. Yet substantially none of those are triggered by night VFR cruise ops.
As I read it, the OP’s question was about operating with mountains in the neighborhood, not operating in the mountains.
The Front Range topography in the roughly Pueblo to Cheyenne corridor is very simple and stark. Ballpark there’s just the flats and the high mountains with very little foothills. There’s hardly anything in the way of protruding ridgelines or free-standing peaks to reach up and snag somebody out over the flats. There’s also enough population along the flats that the whole area is either ground lights = good or dead dark = bad.
By contrast, the situation roughly +/- 50 miles north/south of Salt Lake City has much less forgiving terrain but still heavy ground lighting. Plus /minus 50 miles of Albuquerque there’s bad terrain *and *sparse lighting. Big difference in relative hazard between those three locations.
A countervailing hazard along the Denverish front range is that the benchlands may be mostly flat, but they’re decidedly not horizontal. Aligning with a false horizon and ending up in 5-10 degrees of bank while convinced you’re level is a real set-up for spatial disorientation in pilots lacking IFR skills.
Is night VFR in good VMC less safe than flying on a nice sunny day? Sure. (But mind the density altitude around DEN on summer afternoons!)
Is it always as foolhardy as the OP’s question seems to imply he thought? Not IMO.
If they do disappear, you’re too low.
I am not IFR rated. Dad and I flew from WJF to MFR in his Skyhawk once. (Or maybe it was the Skylane, but I think it was the 172 – I’d have to check my log book.) Dad was a CFII, so I was flying left seat and he was instructing me… at night, in actual IMC. For much of the time, I was convinced we were in a left bank. But my instruments said otherwise. I trusted the instruments. I was very happy when the tops started breaking up and I could see the stars. Trusting the instruments while my body was telling me something different was hard work.
Of course except for the Tehachapis at the beginning of the flight, the terrain was flat. We were in the clear and the Sun was up by the time we reached the Siskiyous.
You need a special rating to fly at night in Canada?
Is 3 TO’s and Landings withing 90 days still the legal VFR requirements for the USA license for taking passengers at night on a PVT License?
Yup. Part 61.57. eCFR :: 14 CFR 61.57 -- Recent flight experience: Pilot in command. (FAR 61.57)
As always, the gotcha was/is they have to be full-stops, not touch and gos. Unlike the day recency requirements where touch and gos count.
What’s slightly interesting to me is that AFAIK 61.57 applies to airline ops too. But while the company IT system does track landings, it doesn’t track night landings. I wonder where the special dispensation for that is hidden? Not that I care beyond idle curiosity.
One little tidbit is that the State of Montana still maintains the old blinking mountaintop beacon lights from the 20’s and 30’s that mark out safe low-altitude corridors through the mountains: Airway Beacons -The End of an Era | Montana Department of Transportation (MDT)
… Because IMC gives complacency, a delay getting back to VMC, and a general inexperience with VMC in difficult situations ?
So they are flying along on autopilot, and now there is crisis…
Switch to VMC ? So are we going left of that mountain or right ?
50/50…
