I'm part-way through a night rating. The biggest problem I had is height perception during the flare. I got over this initially by using the landing light to judge when we were close enough to the runway to begin flaring. If I could see the landing light illuminating the runway surface, we were close enough! (On reflection
, this appears to be a bit like the technique used by the Dambusters to set their bomb-run height, but their lights were more powerful!)
The 5 solo landings allows me time to discover what other visual clues I could derived from the runway lighting. The 'conventional' technique for judging landings, where the runway lights appear around ear height, didn't work for me, possible because I'm short in stature.
My instructor pointed out that distance perception was changed at night - things appearing closer than they really are. I haven't got a great sense of this yet as I've yet to do the night navigation trip.
Other difficulties I expect to encounter will be avoiding cloud, go/no-go decision-making around the adequacy of the visual horizon, spotting other traffic and deterimining the threat they pose based on the navigation lights visible - I hope I never meet a glider or hot-air ballon at night!
One thing I had to ask about was diversion planning. "If we can't land back at base, where else could we go to?" You should know all the local airfields that are open and which directions their runways are oreinted.
What I didn't realise until writing this is that this could affect your fuel planning as well!
From memory some of the other topics we covered were:
safety on the apron at night
pre-flight inspection
how all the various cockpit lighting controls work
how & when to turn on (and off) the external lights
night vision - how to get it, and preserve it
taxing speed
how to spot ice on the wings
cockpit lighting failures
PAPI failure
Operation with minimal runway lights
Forced Landings at night
best wishes
tp