An Imperfect By Lt. Michael Kaiser VT-28 Rangers “Have you ever seen a precautionary emergency landing at night?” I asked Miles, my student. “I have not,” he replied. “All right, my controls.” “Your controls.” “My controls. So basically,” I said, “PELs at night are pretty challenging because it’s incredibly difficult to make out ground reference checkpoints.” We were holding over a VHF omnidirectional range (VOR) at 4,000 feet above mean sea level (MSL) and 4 miles to the west of an airfield near our home base. We had taken off about 45 minutes earlier, just after sunset, and it was Miles’ first nighttime flight.
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I’m a primary flight instructor and Miles, my onwing, had about 20 flight hours in the T-6 Texan II, all of which had been during the day. I was far more comfortable in the aircraft, having flown a significant number of night flights in the local area as an instructor. Miles and I were part of a new test syllabus named Project Avenger that upends the traditional syllabus and allows more leeway in individual flights to practice different skill sets. Think “part task training” taken to the extreme and you would have a reasonable approximation of the test syllabus. In the traditional syllabus, students progress in a linear fashion: they learn how to fly the plane while seeing the ground, then they do formation training, then they learn how to fly without seeing the ground and finally they graduate and move on to advanced.
