Night Rating

In Canada a 'normal' Private Pilot license allows the pilot to fly during VFR conditions (with reference to the ground and at specific weather minima) at day. The night-rating allows me to fly at night (30 min after sunset and 30 min before sunrise) in VFR conditions.

For that I have to learn more about radio-navigation (5 hours of instrument-time) and build hours with touch&go's and a cross country during night.

October 7th - I bought a hand-held GPS a few weeks ago and had it with me on a 1.4h flight today. Want to check out my flight-route? Just have a look here :

This flight took me northwards and then I've tracked the VOR outbound and inbound on radials around 300-330. As you can see in the north-west I've done two 1-minute-rate turns forming a nice '8'. That's all done while I'm wearing a hood restricting the outside view - all manouvers are done while staring at the instruments.

October 29th - Today Farz and I did two approaches. You can see the route here:

Heading northwest towards the VOR and then inbound on the Gatineau Localizer we did a touch&go (red line) and headed back to Ottawa. You can have a look at the procedure plate for Gatineau LOC/DME here. Then back to the Ottawa NDB (Greely) and an ILS approach for runway 32 (green line) - here's the procedure plate for that approach. Another touch&go, crossing the northfield and back for landing. It's quite challenging to keep those instrument indicators where they ought to be but it's still a lot of fun :)

November 1st - Today was my first day of actual night flight conditions. Farz and I took a Cessna 172 and did circuits here in Ottawa. At night pilots have to taxi to the south field which is lightened. We did a few touchdowns on runway 25 and 32. Quite a lot of traffic for a 'calm' night I thought :) - for a nice track of that night click here. I've scanned a plan of the airport showing the blue and green taxi tracks and the red flight track. An overview in the lower-right corner shows the whole track of that night.