The next time you find yourself in the air at sunset, make sure you look out the window. The disappearing landscape silhouetted against a brilliant orange fading to midnight blue with stars on the ground will always capture your awe. And its easy to brush off as, of course, you’ve seen a sunset before. And of course, you’ve seen a city at night before. But the two combined as a transitory state at the edge of the planet’s terminus is really something to behold.
My first sense of awe was inspired by such a state. It was my first night flight, when I was learning to fly. I was twenty years old, in the right seat of a single engine contraption known affectionately as a cessna-152. It was my second or third flight in my entire life, and the oversized man sitting next to me was guiding me through the navigation to a small out field airport in eastern Virginia. Our successful navigation to the selected airport was not even slightly my fault, and as it turned out, I had no idea we were even there.
The flight originated during the day, and night slowly overtook us. An easy way for a first time night pilot to transition into the abyss, as it were. We arrived over the uncontrolled airport after the land was dark, but the sun’s rays still teased us on the other side of the planet. City lights twinkled in the canvas below our seats, but stars had yet to grace us in the evening sky.
Every flight at this point in my life, and for a year or so after, I was sure was going to be my last. I was terrified, lacked confidence, and was sure I was playing well out of my league every day. But I kept showing up, and Matt kept helping through checklists. I didn’t know it at the time, but in the grand scheme of pilots, he was relatively inexperienced as well. Less than a thousand hours, and had not earned his airline transport pilots license yet, he instructed me to get better at his craft, build hours toward the ATP requirement, and, most importantly, make very little money for the risk he was taking on.
He asked me if I could spot the runway, and quizzed me on what to look for. I could recite the colors that the airport beacon that would flash at us (Green for civilian, green and white flashing for military — look this up), but had yet to spot our destination. I knew we should be there, or past the airport at this point. He informed me that this airport had pilot controlled lighting, and that to turn it on, i needed to key the mic five times, so I did.
Its hard to describe the brilliance that met me, and how taken aback by it I was. The airport lit up, as Big Matt promised, after I hit the ‘talk’ button for the fifth time. It was a single luminescent single rectangle, with green runway end lights at the close end fading to red (for danger, of course) at the far end of the short runway. Our airplane was perfectly lined up with it, so Matt had done his job well, and it was obviously the most important thing in the landscape ahead of me.
He landed our little plane for the first time of the night while I held the controls in the other seat, and watched the instruments as he called out the important things to know while landing at night. It turns out, landing at night is exactly the same as landing during the day, except that everything is different. All of the things I had been learning up until this point, that I didn’t realize I had been learning, couldn’t be relied on. All of the visual cues that my brain was starting to wire in had to be ignored, due to visual effects of the darkness. Tonight, we were there to unlearn all the learning we had done up until this point.
I’ll never forget that first sighting of an airport at night. It was brilliant, beautiful, and unexpected. I went on to fly thousands of hours at night, and eventually I grew tired, and later even scared of it. I’m not naturally a night owl, and I was always more tired that I wanted to be while flying at night, and everything seemed a bit unacceptably dangerous.
— I’m not sure how to transition here, into how I feel about flying now, how it got there, and then not to take for granted the view on final at sunset.
🌳 🌿 What I want to be when I grow up 🌳 Change - an essay