Night Flying and other Nonesenses
Jim Davis has a passion for instructing. He has been training civil and military pilots, in the air and on the ground for 50 years. His other passion is writing, which he studied at Curtin University in Perth. You can see, and buy, his two pilot text books PPL and Flight Tests at www.jimdavis.com.au
Jim Davis falls foul of the Dunning-Kruger Effect as he learns how much he doesn’t know about night flying, and fesses up to a ground loop.
I was training this delightful bunch of Pommy pupes in Beaufort West. They were a seismographic crew on a mission to find oil in the Karoo.
Each one was a huge pleasure to fly with. They were young, enthusiastic, well-educated, and they had the money to put in plenty of hours. Soon they had all finished their PPL training and were keen to get on with night ratings.
The first part of this–the instrument flying–went smoothly enough. There was almost no traffic, and Beaufort West had an NDB so we could play let-down let-down. It was when we started the actual night flying that things became interesting.
Two different things happened. The first was partly my fault. I didn’t have a lot of night flying experience, and Diamond Dick Haremse, who had done my night training, in Kimberley, must have been the worst instructor in the world. Actually Dick didn’t instruct at all – he slouched in the right hand seat, like a bag of potatoes, smoking one stinking Camel cigarette after another.
This meant that my ability to give effective night flying training
