The Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) state that to maintain night currency (i.e., being able to take passengers during night flight), a pilot must make 3 landings to a full-stop every 90 days at night.  For this purpose, night is defined as 1 hour after official sunset to 1 hour before official sunrise.  Since we are getting closer to Summer, “night” is getting later and later.  This Saturday, night began at 9:21 PM.

I rented one of the club’s Cessna 152’s for the night currency.  Before it became real dark, around 8:00 PM, I took the plane up for some pattern work.  I practiced all the different types of landings and then made the 3 required landings after dark.  All in all, I made 8 takeoffs and landings.  The night was clear and cool with no wind at all.  It definitely made things easy.  I heard so many whippoorwills, they blended together like cicadas during a Summer day.

I was the absolute last person at the airport so I got to turn the lights off, lock the doors and enjoy the silence of the airport at night.

This afternoon, the whole family was able to go up for the first time together.  It took about 30 minutes to get everyone loaded into Piper Warrior N64TZ for just a 30 minute flight.  Did a little sightseeing to see if everyone could handle it.  It was Liani’s first time in a small general aviation airplane.  She did fine.  No motion sickness or anything, but we had some problems with her and the kids’ headsets, so we landed pretty quickly.  They all said once the headset/radio issues were resolved, they wanted to fly longer.  That is a good sign.

This morning I flew with a friend of mine that will be an international missionary with the International Missions Board (IMB).  Since he will be in the foreign mission field, I will not mention his name, but he is a licensed pilot himself and would love the opportunity to utilize aviation on the mission field.  In the meantime, we took the Remos light sport from KLHZ (North Triangle) to KISO (Kinston) and back.  The weather was perfect!  Light winds and cool temperatures.  An absolutely beautiful early-May Saturday.

Here is a selfie that he took to memorialize the flight.

I guess this is proof that I can pilot an aircraft.  I will try to upload a video later showing a crosswind landing of the Remos.  The winds were not too gusty but were directly across the runway.  This required a “sideslip” to landing and my right wheels touched down a couple of seconds before the left wheels did.

In addition, I have completed approximately 13 hours of Pilot-In-Command (PIC) cross-country time and can start Instrument training shortly.