Night Current/Safety Pilot

On the ILS RWY 1 at KILG

Mike and I traded text messages late in the day trying to schedule some flight time, it was to nice not to be in the air.  We agreed on 5ish and I bugged out of work for my haircut appointment. I got in the chair early and was walking out the door exactly at the scheduled time of my appointment, I love being early.  I had to turn and burn at the house to take care of the Maggie muffin and grab my flight bag.

I was heading south and ran into the traffic snarl on I-95 as I approached the ramp.  I diverted to a back up plan of heading into Wilmington and then jumping on south of the back up, it sounded good.  I managed to get back on I-95 and make the crawl to the plane.

Mike was running late so I got the pre-flight completed and climbed aboard. I was left seat tonight and got myself set up as Mike climbed on the wing. Mike did a second walk around then climbed in for the flight. Traffic was busy at ILG with corporates and the Air national Guard flying. We taxied to runway niner at kilo 5 and once cleared we were headed towards the south east, to Millville, KMIV.  Mike shot multiple approaches, the ILS RWY 10 and VOR A and I mixed in three landings and take offs for night currency.

I made two nice landings and one really crap, and I hate to call it a landing, more of a bounce it on in.  I had decided to bring up the lights on high intensity when turning base, wow, they look nice.  However, on short final I could not see the runway from all the glare and the bright lights messed with my night vision.  Like I said, I found the runway and it wasn't pretty.

The only traffic at Millville was a King Air departing on an IFR flight to the Carolina's.  I watched him depart as Mike was on the VOR A inbound.  We headed back to Wilmington and Mike worked Philly approach for the practice ILS RWY 1. We got one vector towards the final approach  then when we should have gotten a turn to intercept we were instructed to turn away about ten degrees for traffic. Approach followed up with a large right turn from heading 280* to 030* to intercept. Mike captured the localizer and road the rails to the runway, super nice job.