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Old 14th June 2011 | 20:14
  #1695 (permalink)  
Lonewolf_50
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: Military
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And stop flying at night with the storm light "On" in the cockpit, that will help a little bit... (flying in a dark cockpit is also supposed to be typical of ex-military pilots, I heard...)
As I suspect you already know, there were some good reasons for that, which included the need to remain night adapted when you needed an inside outside scan during certain parts of your night mission. The military now (as I understand it) deal in two kinds of night flying: aided and un-aided. Unaided is like old school night flying, aided is with various NVG suites added to the pilots kit. (ANVS 9, etc) That requires NVG compatible lighting.

Lucky for the airlines, that modification requirement hasn't arrived.

Will it? Not sure. Treating night as instrument probably covers most bases in that regard ... with the exception of different challenges in see and avoid.

Which takes us to the weather/clouds.

"See and avoid" vis a vis clouds at night can be tricky.

For Gerard: To expand on your comment in re weather.

The depicted differences in temperature (Vasquez plots referred to) typically accompany differences in the characteristic of the air columns within a cloud (like the build ups in the ITCZ), a difference which at high altitude (warm air rising) any pilot will be interested in since it influences his aircraft's performance to one degree or another. (AF 447 crew were keeping an eye on temp (was TAT probe iced?) and commented on how that influenced their original plans for the route ...) Is there a way to link those sorts of data from weather services to a cockpit selectable screen?

Food for thought. Might be a handy tool for crews at high altitude. (IIRC, we discussed this somewhat in the first iteration of the AF 447 search thread ... )
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