Gubbins
Ejection Handle Pulled
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2011
- Messages
- 379
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gone for good
I just saw the other thread on disorientation when flying IFR at night in IMC conditions. I generally don't fly at night for long trips, simply because I'm flying for fun (not business) and choose to go during the day where I can see more.
A couple of days ago I had the experience where I was heading back from San Francisco to Las Vegas (just before the weather came in). I wanted to fly VFR so I had to fly down to almost Fresno before I could get above the layer, and climb high enough to cross the Sierra Nevada and chose to do that near Mt Whitney. The sun was just setting and it was stunning seeing the peak glowing red. But shortly after passing by the peak, it got dark really quickly seeing that I was flying east with a strong tail wind and at some point I realized I couldn't see anything at all. No lights, no horizon, no nothing. Just the knowledge that there were mountains out there. I have SVT, and from the moving map and my sectional as well I knew I had no issues. I was well above the OROCA for the area. But even so I thought to myself "This is BS, this is not VFR, I can't see anything". Couple that with some fairly strong turbulence from the strong tail winds coming over the mountains, it was more than a little disconcerting. So I promptly asked for (and got) a popup IFR clearance because it just didn't feel right to be flying VFR in those conditions (even though it was legal). Something that was going through my mind was that if visibility dropped below VFR limits in those conditions, I wouldn't even know because it was so dark.
So this leads me to the question, for those of you who do fly long distances at night, do you prefer to go IFR or VFR?
A couple of days ago I had the experience where I was heading back from San Francisco to Las Vegas (just before the weather came in). I wanted to fly VFR so I had to fly down to almost Fresno before I could get above the layer, and climb high enough to cross the Sierra Nevada and chose to do that near Mt Whitney. The sun was just setting and it was stunning seeing the peak glowing red. But shortly after passing by the peak, it got dark really quickly seeing that I was flying east with a strong tail wind and at some point I realized I couldn't see anything at all. No lights, no horizon, no nothing. Just the knowledge that there were mountains out there. I have SVT, and from the moving map and my sectional as well I knew I had no issues. I was well above the OROCA for the area. But even so I thought to myself "This is BS, this is not VFR, I can't see anything". Couple that with some fairly strong turbulence from the strong tail winds coming over the mountains, it was more than a little disconcerting. So I promptly asked for (and got) a popup IFR clearance because it just didn't feel right to be flying VFR in those conditions (even though it was legal). Something that was going through my mind was that if visibility dropped below VFR limits in those conditions, I wouldn't even know because it was so dark.
So this leads me to the question, for those of you who do fly long distances at night, do you prefer to go IFR or VFR?