Originally Posted by
aa777888
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.
I've got over 350 night hours (almost all over a city in an R22) and I still avoid rural America like the plague,...and fly longer to stay over more lighted areas.
Then again my first night flight was over the open desert between Phoenix and Tuscon with nothing but the lights of a skinny little road 1,500' below. Followed by an even longer one a couple nights later to Long Beach. That was enough to cure me of any desire to fly xc over nothing at night in anything but a Southwest airliner.
Then I hear about a school I went to flying an R44 over the open ocean between Hawaiian Islands at night and think, "those guys are nuts!"
Maybe I'd feel differently if I'd had instructors with real helicopter experience teaching me?
Then again I also think, "Well, they taught me how to fly at night. They taught me how to land off airport. If I can't put those two together, then maybe I'm not fit to be a pilot?"