Wednesday, November 09, 2011

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.

3 comments:

Steve said...

Nothing like a clear night, especially in the fall when the air's so clean. Glad to see you've got your night currency back.

Gary said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Gary said...

Gorgeous night....

I was still current at night but going to lapse in early December, figured I would get it done.