Night Flight Under the Hood
Aircraft:Cessna 172L – N13818
Length of Flight: 1.3 Hrs – Dual
Total Flight Hours to Date: 53.2 Hrs
Altitude: 2500-4500 Feet
Route: Whiteman to Van Nuys to Whiteman
Cost: $162.65
Click to download the Google Earth Tour file (Google Earth Help)
I needed more hours of flight time at night as well as more time under the hood. That means you wear this dorky looking huge plastic pseudo-baseball hat looking thing. The idea is that you’re simulating flying by instruments only, so the “hood” restricts your vision to only the instruments in the cockpit and you can’t see outside. Sounds scary but it’s really not that bad. Travis is sitting next to me giving me coordinates to fly. Like “fly a heading of 090 and maintain 4500 feet.” So I’d do that just by looking at the instruments in the plane. And doing it at night is not any worse than doing it during the day. So we flew around for a bit then he had me do an approach to Van Nuys and had me keep the hood on until we were about 1 mile from landing! Then he said take the hood off and land the plane….ok….it wasn’t that bad except I forgot to put the flaps down and Travis had to give me the “full flaps” advice. Then I did this crappy landing…I was doing great until then. The runway lights are awfully pretty though.
While under the hood Travis also had me “recovering from unusual attitudes” It’s not what you’re thinking, “snap out of it man you’ve got a plane to fly!” It’s more like this. Sometimes the plane can be banking or descending and it can feel like nothing is different, as if you’re still flying straight and level. So if you happen to be flying in the clouds or even if you’re looking down at the instruments or charts and are not paying attention to what the gauges are really telling you, you can get into an “unusual attitude” with the plane. The idea is you look at your gauges and correct accordingly. So Travis had me look at my lap while he gradually put the plane into an unusual attitude then had me look up at the gauges and recover. On the first one the plane was banking to the left and diving and it really didn’t feel that “wrong” while I was looking at my lap, so I looked at the gauges and adjusted accordingly. I was a little slow on the first one but got better the second and third time. You have to look up at the gauges and first figure out what the plane is actually doing then decide what to do to fix it, and you do this while under the hood, so you don’t look outside at all.