Night Flight!

Now that daylight savings time has gone away, and the sun sets at its correct time, which means earlier, I got to do a flight at night.  Usually I fly on Wednesdays from 2PM to 4PM, but I didn't book early enough - usually 3 weeks ahead, so the only slot open was 4PM to 6PM.  So what was great was that sunset is 4:42PM.  The aircraft was late coming back from a previous flight so we didn't really take off until 4:40 or so when there was still light in the sky and a bit of a colorful sunset.  We did two takeoffs and landings and it was dark after that.  Then we flew from Brookhaven airport over to Islip MacArthur airport, so that I could refresh my radio work with air traffic control.  We did one touch and go at that much larger airport and then came back to the small airport to land.  When I saw this view out the window, I said to the instructor "Your airplane" and he takes over while I shoot.  He's used to that by now!  When I am done I say "My airplane" and then I am back in control of flying.  It was an absolutely magnificent night of flying. I probably haven't flown a small, single engine airplane at night in over 20 years.

This was the first photograph I took, which was the sunset.  I was concentrating on flying and hadn't set the camera correctly on the ground, so the photograph is blurry, but you can get some idea of how beautiful the sky was, before it got dark.  Scenes like this are a reminder to me of why I fly!