How do pilots see at night during flight?
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This is a great question, and I want to relate something that you might not have thought about: the absence of light can tell you a lot. One night my F/O and I were diverted to Asheville, NC. We were flying a non-precision approach we’d never flown before into an airport we’d never been to before after approach control had closed for the night. The weather was clear and a million. (I should point out that this was in the days before we had reliable ground mapping radar.)
As we let down on the approach we could see the airport from about twenty miles out. I was tempted to cancel and fly a visual, but stayed on the approach and leveled off at all intermediate altitudes. We could see ground lights in all directions except directly in front of us, between us and the airport. It struck me a curious, but not much more.
All of a sudden, as we approached another descent point, a whole sea of lights appeared directly in front of us. I realized then that a mountain had been obscuring everything between us and the airport, and that if we’d descended any further we’d have been a smoking hole near the top of it. It was another one of those “today I learned” experiences for a young captain.
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