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Flying Lesson 22
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Again with weather cooperating this would seem to be a wonderful night for flying. As I drove to the airport I could see multiple aircraft in the area of the airport. The sky was clear and wind was minimal. The instructor did the preflight while it was light so I just simply did a walk-around, we topped off the fuel and were on our way. In order to meet the nightflight requirements I need ten landings total, and three hours of flying. I had perfromed three landings and about two hours of total airtime on the first nightflight, doins some basic math obviously I needed one more hour in the air along with seven addition landings. As apprehensive as I felt for the first nightflight, I make great strides in confidence for tonight's lesson. Many of the unknowns were taken care of on the first nighttime lesson. I just wanted to get back in the air day or night at this point. My last lesson was focused on communication with a tower controlled airport so we started off tonight's lesson by heading over to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton for a few landings first, three were planned to be exact.
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I found myself doing all the radio communication tonight and that was OK by me. Although I was a bit shaky I actually feel I did well. I have been studying communication procedures harder than anything else I have studied to this point. So when it came time for initial contact with the approach control, I was ready and able. I made many of the calls without coaching although a few times I still became tongue-tied and needed a prompt from the instructor. Evnings at this airport don't seem to be very busy which made things at least a little easier. We entered the pattern downwind on runway 4 which is what I was hoping for because it is the easiest. From that point everything was fine except that we had to land without the PAPI lights. When we listened to ATIS beforehand, it was clearly noted that the PAPI lights were not functional.
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PAPI stands for precision approach path indicator. This was inconvenient because personally I think every airport should have a set of PAPI. This system is very convenient and really cool I might add. This airport also has a large set of lights that guide planes to the runway. I'm not sure of the name right now, but it was also off. The instructor said it is only turned on for IFR conditions.
Three full stop landings were completed perfectly. The controller actually became a bit confused and gave us a heading to leave the airport pattern after only two landings. We had to correct him and request another full stop landing. This wasn't a problem and the rest of the evening went perfectly normal. We did proceed to leave the pattern on course to Wyoming Valley airport next. I was expected to do three more full stops there as well. This is a smaller runway not nearly as well lit as AVP. The landings went very well as this was my first time at this airport. I know it would have been difficult to find if I were alone, the lights are turned on by keying the microphone 5 times. When we were near the airport, my instructor hinted I should attempt to activate the runway lights. Lighting up the runway is a cool concept and you can only experience it for yourself by actually flying there in the evening. We proceeded to head for home for one final landing and that was all for tonight's lesson as well as my nighflight requirements.
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