The city at night.

Jim Case

Jim Case

Pre-takeoff checklist
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AceDolphinFlyer
anybody else really love to fly over a buzzing city when it's dark out? This was the experience that lanched my love for aviation. It gives me chills. I can always hear David Crosbys "what's broken" in my head and I get numb!
 
Night flying is the best, unfortunately I don't do enough of it.
 
Oh yes, absolutely. I used to love doing that when I lived in the Detroit area. Coming back downstate from Up North, it was a great sight to see first Midland/Bay City/Saginaw, then Flint, then Pontiac and the megalopolis glide underneath. Up here in the sticks there are no real cities nearby, but when I flew to Block Island a couple of years ago and came back as night fell, I enjoyed seeing the cities of RI and SE MA lit up like Christmas trees.
 
Flew into LGA years ago one night, coming up the sound for runway 22. Turning final for runway 22 and there's all the lights of Manhattan just beyond the end of the runway. Really impressive and actually beautiful in a way.

Another time flying a C172 on a check haul run up to MEM above an overcast. Just short of MEM the overcast ended, and it was as though you were flying over a cliff as MEM slid into view.

Always loved night flying, and I seemed to land smoother at night too.
 
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azure said:
Oh yes, absolutely. I used to love doing that when I lived in the Detroit area. Coming back downstate from Up North, it was a great sight to see first Midland/Bay City/Saginaw, then Flint, then Pontiac and the megalopolis glide underneath. Up here in the sticks there are no real cities nearby, but when I flew to Block Island a couple of years ago and came back as night fell, I enjoyed seeing the cities of RI and SE MA lit up like Christmas trees.
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Dude, this is exactly where I live, in the Detroit area. I plot dang near that same flight every other mounth on my cross country practice flights. It's amazing
 
Due to my prior 2 helicopter careers, I still have more night time logged than day. But now I figure I have pushed the envelope enough and only fly at night enough to stay current. Just my 2 cents.
 
Jim Case said:
Stunning. Pictures never do justice though... to bad Detroit is so ugly durning daylight hours!
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Things are changing rather rapidly, though. Detroit's downtown area and the River Walk are really nice.

Night is also my favorite time to fly. Two weeks ago, my wife and I flew cats for Pilots And Paws from Niagara Falls to Flint, MI. We flew IFR, it was a dark, moonless night with a thin overcast layer underneath us. There we were, humming along, surrounded by almost complete blackness - except of the areas where the cloud layer was glowing in a warmish white color from the city lights underneath. The most beautiful and peaceful sight! :)

I made a while ago a short video of a night flight from Ann Arbor, around Detroit and back. Detroit Metro tower even allowed us to do a touch and go at KDTW:
 
mscard88 said:
Take a pic a little further NNW of all those abandoned homes. That's reality.
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Look in the bottom left corner of the daytime Detroit picture I posted...all that green grass was filled with homes just a short time ago.
 
tawood said:
Look in the bottom left corner of the daytime Detroit picture I posted...all that green grass was filled with homes just a short time ago.
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Sure, downtown and along the water front. Go north young man! ;)
 
And a funny side note about Detroit: when every my girlfriend and I fly the VFR corridor over Detroit (and later down the river towards Toledo), we both smell fried chicken. There must be some kind of rendering plant or something nearby, that we end up flying through it's fumes.
 
tawood said:
And a funny side note about Detroit: when every my girlfriend and I fly the VFR corridor over Detroit (and later down the river towards Toledo), we both smell fried chicken. There must be some kind of rendering plant or something nearby, that we end up flying through it's fumes.
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Or the....never mind. :D
 
German guy said:
Things are changing rather rapidly, though. Detroit's downtown area and the River Walk are really nice.

Night is also my favorite time to fly. Two weeks ago, my wife and I flew cats for Pilots And Paws from Niagara Falls to Flint, MI. We flew IFR, it was a dark, moonless night with a thin overcast layer underneath us. There we were, humming along, surrounded by almost complete blackness - except of the areas where the cloud layer was glowing in a warmish white color from the city lights underneath. The most beautiful and peaceful sight! :)

I made a while ago a short video of a night flight from Ann Arbor, around Detroit and back. Detroit Metro tower even allowed us to do a touch and go at KDTW:
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Love it
 
retpd2001 said:
Due to my prior 2 helicopter careers, I still have more night time logged than day. But now I figure I have pushed the envelope enough and only fly at night enough to stay current. Just my 2 cents.
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I get it, not everybody has the same interest, I love night flying and prefer it to daylight personally
 
mscard88 said:
Sure, downtown and along the water front. Go north young man! ;)
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This is very much a reality, and it stinks because Detroit really is a great city...
 
Tom-D said:
Great city.. oxymoron ?
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No, I've lived in Detroit all my life, it has some great things going for it and is getting better and better all the time. It's just that if you take a wrong turn you will see first hand why people think it's so bad.
 
@Germanguy:

If you want to see the real Detroit get on Livernois at Eight Mile and drive to Delray. Keep your sidekick on your lap while doing that.
 
Norman said:
@Germanguy:

If you want to see the real Detroit get on Livernois at Eight Mile and drive to Delray. Keep your sidekick on your lap while doing that.
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I've been to delray hundreds of times, and yes it's impossible to not take notice of the major disrepair the area is in. At night it looks like a set from a slasher film, but as a resident of Detroit I'd tell you that there are just as many good areas. Such as the whole strip off of Woodward and west Montcalm. Where you have Comerica park, the fox, the Filmore, the opera house, ford feild. There are other nice areas in the city aswell, but the crime rate and overall disrepair of many areas is pretty bad, so Detroit gets a worse reputation than it deserves.
 
Back before 9/11 I used to come over the BALT-WASH area all the time at night. Very pretty (I was based at IAD even).
 
flyingron said:
Back before 9/11 I used to come over the BALT-WASH area all the time at night. Very pretty (I was based at IAD even).
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Yep, still is. I did a bunch of night flying last year at W00, lots of fun picking out the beacon against the city lights.
 
GeorgeC said:
Yep, still is. I did a bunch of night flying last year at W00, lots of fun picking out the beacon against the city lights.
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More important to pick out the lights on the high tension lines adjacent. I grew up not far from that airport.
 
Here's NYC from over New Jersey looking south from a couple months ago.

Years ago I used to fly Atlantic City junkets. Flying home at midnight, we would get over the top of New York. Had this one captain that, no matter how many times you had flown with him, would always say, "I wonder how many people are down there fxxxing right now"
 

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Norman said:
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If you want to see the real Detroit get on Livernois at Eight Mile and drive to Delray. Keep your sidekick on your lap while doing that.
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I’ve been to some run down areas of Detroit at night, when I had to.
Even though I think that these areas should not be ignored, as some level of awareness is needed in order to work on problems, I also don’t see much of a point on entirely focusing on them and to reduce Detroit to these problematic areas.

New York City is also more than just the Bronx. Actually, it is rarely, if ever, mentioned when people talk about NYC..
 
flyingron said:
More important to pick out the lights on the high tension lines adjacent. I grew up not far from that airport.
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"I know that notch in the trees is around here somewhere..." :)
 
I adore night flying. As I get older and two friends have now had night engine outs in singles, I become a little more wary of it, though -- just a touch, but it can make it feel a little less fun than back when I was young and invincible.

They both survived them, BTW. One on a city street, the other made it to a runway.
 
Everskyward said:
One of the few distinct memories I have of getting my private is taking the hood off after a XC that went from the afternoon into the night and seeing the lights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
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I had that experience after night instrument training, except I DIDN'T see the lights when I took the hood off. "NorCal Cessna 123XY needs a pop up clearance request vectors Reid RNAV Z 31R." Summer undercast....
 
German guy said:
I made a while ago a short video of a night flight from Ann Arbor, around Detroit and back. Detroit Metro tower even allowed us to do a touch and go at KDTW:
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Awesome video! I've flown the River Tour as well, and have had success getting clearance to do touch and goes at DTW. Makes for a nice evening on those calm clear nights.

One of the best night flights here recently was flying from Buffalo back to NW Ohio along the Lake Erie shoreline. Approaching Cleveland, all of downtown was lit up, as well as the ball park. Looking northwest across the lake, 82 NM in the distance I could clearly see Monroe. That was one of those "this is why I fly" moments.

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Flying Phanatic said:
One of the best night flights here recently was flying from Buffalo back to NW Ohio along the Lake Erie shoreline. Approaching Cleveland, all of downtown was lit up, as well as the ball park. Looking northwest across the lake, 82 NM in the distance I could clearly see Monroe. That was one of those "this is why I fly" moments.
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One of the most impressive sights I remember from my Michigan days was returning from southern Ohio, approaching Lake Erie at 8500 after dark and seeing the lights of Detroit in the distance, all the way across the Lake and the "Banana Belt" slice of Ontario between Lake Erie and the river (and Lake St. Clair). It took a while to dawn on me that I was actually seeing Detroit and not Ohio lakeshore towns like Port Clinton and Sandusky, and that the black space ahead of me was the lake and not an uninhabited strip of Ohio. Great memories.
 
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