I've done night VFR and as stated as long as you stay in VFR conditions and don't play hide and seek in clouds or fog, it's actually very nice. One thing to make sure is that you file a VFR flightplan and have ATC at all times as sometimes traffic is hard to see.

 

8 hours ago, himmelhorse said:

However, I question the wisdom of taking off at 1.30AM into a weather front which forces you to fly at 1000ft, I cannot imagine, that you could spot an airfield at that height, until you were almost on top of it, or at least very close.That would call for some pretty precise navigation, I have to assume his aircraft was GPS equipped.

Back in my time there was no GPS, and the GA aircraft I'm flying today still aren't GPS equipped.

Still navigating the old fashioned way. It's definitely satisfying when your navigation calculations and precise flying work out, so that you arrive over your planned waypoint exactly at the correct time.

And you don't start sweating when the GPS fails 😉 

  

4 hours ago, FDEdev said:

Back in my time there was no GPS, and the GA aircraft I'm flying today still aren't GPS equipped.

Still navigating the old fashioned way. It's definitely satisfying when your navigation calculations and precise flying work out, so that you arrive over your planned waypoint exactly at the correct time.

And you don't start sweating when the GPS fails 😉 

  

Memories of threads long gone with Larry Adamson 😁

Edited December 4, 20196 yr by domkle

8 hours ago, FDEdev said:

 

Still navigating the old fashioned way. It's definitely satisfying when your navigation calculations and precise flying work out, so that you arrive over your planned waypoint exactly at the correct time.

  

This is how I fell in love with flight simulator.  being able to tune two VFRs and calculating where two radials intersect and flying one till it disappears and then flying blind for a while and then seeing your VFR come back to life and fly that radial right to your destination.  The early versions of FS only had a few areas done and it was great fun to fly blind between them and see that it actually was one connected world.

19 hours ago, himmelhorse said:

However, I question the wisdom of taking off at 1.30AM into a weather front which forces you to fly at 1000ft, I cannot imagine, that you could spot an airfield at that height, until you were almost on top of it, or at least very close.

You'd be surprised at how far you can see from 1000ft. The theoretical visual horizon at 1000ft agl is almost 39 miles (approximate distance to the horizon in miles = 1.23 times the square root of the eye height in feet - https://aty.sdsu.edu/explain/atmos_refr/horizon.html). Even further if you allow for atmospheric refraction! Obviously met visibility or obstructions/high ground can significantly reduce that but it's still potentially a long way.

Edited December 4, 20196 yr by vortex681

4 hours ago, sightseer said:

This is how I fell in love with flight simulator.  being able to tune two VFRs and calculating where two radials intersect and flying one till it disappears and then flying blind for a while and then seeing your VFR come back to life and fly that radial right to your destination.  The early versions of FS only had a few areas done and it was great fun to fly blind between them and see that it actually was one connected world.

When I first started with FS-5.1, that's exactly what I did.  I had a document where I recorded the frequencies for different cities, and for each city would say that from here I could go east to such and such, NW to somewhere else, south to another, etc.  The was no map in those days, but I had found a way to fly pretty much everywhere in the eastern half of the US.

Edited December 4, 20196 yr by andyjohnston.net

This issue with being forced down to 1000 ft AGL is definitely a slight problem with visibility as far is seeing visual checkpoints, but really the larger problem is one of time. Take a typical single engine Cessna. At best glide speed of 65 knots, you get a (somewhat optimistic) glide ratio of 9:1. So that's 9000 ft (1.5 NM) forward for your 1000 feet of altitude. Had that engine vibration turned in to a full blown engine failure, you have less than a minute and a half before you are on the ground somewhere...and since it is night, you are really limited in your options for picking where to put it down.

@carmined kudos for recognizing for situation, asking ATC for help and getting down on the ground asap! Weather in the summer in FL is easy to forecast (hazy, hot, and humid, with a chance of thunder storms), but hard to predict! That was a good story!

12 hours ago, domkle said:

Memories of threads long gone with Larry Adamson 😁