Wow, flying at night is actually quite pleasant. It feels a lot more relaxed and peaceful than flying during the day. I think a big factor that contributes towards that is the fact that the wind is a lot calmer at night, but it also had to do with the fact that you can't see most of the world below you, so it feels like flying over nothingness. Kind of like at the end of the Langoliers, except you don't have to fly through a time warp while asleep to get back home.

Landing wasn't too hard either. You do have less visual reference with which to judge your altitude, so you have to be careful not to flare too high from the runway, but really I never felt uncomfortable or out of control while landing. The runway lighting actually makes the dimensions of the runway easier to see than during the day.

And it's remotely controllable! You can click your mic button varying numbers of times to change the intensity of the runway lighting (three clicks for low intensity, five for medium intensity, and seven for maximum brightness). That was so fun. It's like having a remote control for a whole airport. It also helps when you've been out doing maneuvers and you're trying to figure out where the airport is. Just click the mic seven times and look for the brightening lights. It's like when you're wandering around the parking lot trying to find your car, and you press the unlock button on your keychain and watch for the flashing lights. Except, again, it's a whole damn airport.

Once we'd done a few touch-and-go's to give me a feel for landing at night, we flew out away from the airport and climbed up higher, and he had me look down and close my eyes while he did some crazy stuff and put the plane in some weird attitude, then had me open my eyes and recover as quickly as I could. That really drove the point home that your inner sense of position can lie to you — several times as I felt him turning the plane around, I was pretty sure he had left it in something close to level flight, only to open my eyes and find that we're banked almost vertical and diving towards the ground at 160 mph.

He also had me look down and close my eyes, but continue to fly the plane myself, following his directions. He told me to make a gentle right climbing turn, then level the wings and open my eyes. I opened them to find us once again in a steep spiraling dive towards the surface. Hehe, oh.

The moral of the story is to trust your instruments over your proprioceptive sense (thanks, Tourniquet, for that word). If you accidentally fly into a cloud or otherwise find yourself without an outside visual reference, ignore what your body tells you is happening and stick to the instruments. Because your body is an idiot. We've been on the ground for 16 million years and only flying for about 100 years, so I guess our inner ear hasn't had much need to evolve a good sense of identifying three-dimensional motion until now.

After that, we flew back to the airport and did five more landings to give me some more practice, including one simulated engine failure. It really is pleasant and peaceful to be up there in the dark. I was just starting to think that maybe I want to do most of my flying at night, until Mike pointed out that flying in a single-engine plane at night is one of the most risky types of flying, since you can't tell what's on the ground so it's just about impossible to identify a landing field if you lose your engine. You can see a big patch of blackness below you and you have no idea if it's a nice big flat field or a forest. That's a good point. Maybe I'll stick to mostly daytime flying. Even if I don't get to play with my airport remote control.