When helicopter pilots with the Flight for Life Colorado team fly into the black of night, they have a new flight command: "Goggle up."
The emergency medical service flight program recently bought nine pairs of night-vision goggles - at about $10,000 a pair - to aid pilots during night flights.
Lead helicopter pilot Rod Balak said there's an old line among pilots that "mountains grow in the darkness." The new goggles, which weigh about 1 pound each and run on two AA batteries, take some of the angst out of that adage.
"It makes the pilots and crews feel a lot safer," Balak said. "It's just like daytime, only it has a type of green tint to it."
Balak, a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot, said night-vision goggles have improved radically since being introduced decades ago during the Vietnam War as "behemoth" rifle scopes.
Over the years, as goggles became smaller and vision quality improved, interest in using them beyond military applications took root.
Without goggles, flying at night in isolated areas can sometimes be like looking "inside a 50-gallon drum," Balak said.
Mountain contours, trees and rock outcroppings can sometimes be difficult to pick up during the night, depending on cloud cover and the light of the moon, Balak said.
Simply put, goggles make night flights less risky, said Dutch Fridd, an NVG instructor based in North Carolina with Air Methods Corp.
"If a pilot can see the terrain, he wouldn't run into it," Fridd said. "That's kind of a no-brainer; we use it for safety reasons. It just makes our jobs safer."
But the safety measure comes at a cost. Instrument boards on the helicopters have to be retrofitted or else pilots wouldn't be able to read them while wearing the goggles.
And pilots must go through training, in the classroom and in flight, before wearing the goggles during an EMS flight.
All told, training, goggles and retrofitting instrument panels runs about $90,000 for each of the four helicopters.
"The technology to keep us safer and to improve our operations is rarely inexpensive," said Kathy Mayer, program director of Flight for Life Colorado.
A foundation that supports the EMS flight program is funding the costs of the goggles, training and makeover of the helicopters.
Flight for Life has 15 pilots. Training for the goggle conversion is ongoing, Mayer said.
"These aren't going to extend our capabilities and allow us to do things that we are turning down," such as flights in extremely bad weather, Mayer said. "What they will do is allow us to fly more safely during our night operations, especially in the mountains during those dark, moonless nights."