Originally Posted by
Robbiee
Would you really feel comfortable doing off airport night landing training with a cfi who's just a wet behind the ears kid who's only real world experience is the occasional photo flight, and who's only night experience is maybe ten more hours of sitting as a pax while his students do their ten trips around the pattern and one short xc to another (lighted and paved) airport?
Yes, that is very much a large part of the problem. I had plenty more fixed wing night hours then my first helicopter instructor had any sort of night hours. When planning my night XC he was horrified of my first choice, an easy hop over the countryside into a nice, mid-sized, well lighted airport that I had been to many times in the dark, even as a fixed wing student. "Too dark that way" he said. That was my first inkling of the training shortfalls I would experience. He had us going a much longer distance over an urban landscape that was brilliantly lit.