Within a couple weeks of completing my commercial helicopter license I returned to Chinook Helicopters in B.C. to chase down some additional ratings.

Night Life

In the United States, some rudimentary exposure to night flying is a required part of any helicopter training — and as such (setting aside the issue of staying current), any licensed VFR pilot is automatically qualified to fly at night.

But the Canadian commercial helicopter license is different — in Canada, night instruction is extra and constitutes a separate rating that must be done with the license already in hand. In other words, any fresh-from-the-wrapper Canadian helicopter license (even commercial) comes with a restriction: Day VFR only.

This is actually no problem for most pilots, since commercial single-engine helicopters in Canada cannot carry passengers after dark anyway— whether or not the pilot is night rated. As such, I know a couple of long-working helicopter pilots in Canada who saw no need for the night rating and never bothered to get it.

But they weren’t dealing with the issue of international equivalence. A pilot with a Canadian commercial helicopter license can apply for a reciprocal U.S. commercial helicopter license so long as they have 150+ flight hours, pass an FAA written test, and, of course, possess a valid Canadian license. But here’s the rub: Any foreign license reciprocity will carry with it any restrictions placed on that foreign license. In other words, even though the U.S. doesn’t itself have (or recognize) a separate night VFR rating, the fact that my Canadian license was limited to “Day VFR only” would mean that its U.S. equivalent would also be so limited. If I applied for an FAA license based just on my “naked” Canadian commercial, I would end up being among the only helicopter pilots in the U.S. with a “day flight only” limitation.

So in addition to the intrinsic value of being able to fly after dark, I have another good reason to get a night rating: Namely, to be able to apply for an unrestricted, night-capable U.S. license.

So that’s what I did.

The Canadian night rating itself requires 10 hours of night flight, something harder than you might think to achieve in the middle of summer. Even at the very southernmost edge of Canada — Abbotsford B.C., where I trained, sits right at a U.S. border crossing — it still didn’t get dark until about 9:00pm in late May. I had planned to knock out 2.5 hours a night over 4 nights, but we lost the first night due to weather and ended up doing 3.3+ hours of flight time each night. Add in inspection, run up, fuel stops, and shutdown, and one night we didn’t get back until almost 2:00am.

A Dozen Unordered Thoughts on the Night Rating

The night rating was a great experience. Here are some thoughts on it, if you’re thinking of doing one yourself (or just interested to know what it’s like):

(1) Bring a camera. Night flight over a major (and attractive) city like Vancouver makes for some stunning visuals.

(2) In unlit areas, visibility is near zero, particularly on moonless nights. This means wires, trees, terrain, and even clouds become unseen hazards. All the night classes in the world won’t enable you to fly in pitch darkness when you can’t see anything, so absent a Night Vision Goggles class (maybe soon!) you’re pretty much limited to at least semi-urban or otherwise illuminated areas.

(3) At night, a helicopter in effect becomes an airplane. You’ll do airplane circuits, and take off an land at airports, on runways. This is surprisingly alien to some helo pilots, myself included. (I did considerably more airplane circuits and airport landings in ten hours of night training than I had in well over a hundred hours of daytime instruction.) This is actually quite useful, and it’s an unexpected benefit of the night rating — you almost can’t help but up your proficiency at airplane circuits and airport/runway operations.

(4) There are a number of visual illusions that happen at night (like the “black hole effect”), which you can read about easily enough, but it’s quite interesting to see and experience them yourself.

(5) Using the ARCAL to remotely key-on runway lights using the radio is pretty cool. Just remember to re-up them when you’re on final—they’re on a timer, and the last thing you want is the runway lights shutting off just as you’re about to touch down.

(6) Once you come to a hover, even a well-lit runway can have some seriously dark patches. One way to approach this is to align next to a runway light, and then hover slowly to the ground, using the light in your peripheral vision to better gauge when you’ll actually touch down.

(7) Flying cross-country, the landmarks visible from the air at night can differ from those visible during the day.

(8) Quite a lot of controlled airspace reverts to uncontrolled / MF at night. Control towers shut down and the controllers go home. This means you can fly through some pretty high-rent airspace without actually talking to a tower or requesting a clearance (though you’ll still have to announce yourself to area “traffic” if it’s a MF). It also means that our local control tower in Abbotsford switches over to a remote fellow in Cranbrook in the wee hours. Cranbrook radio can’t give you clearances, so you just sort of tell him what you’re doing all the time. As my instructor Rob said when Cranbrook radio came online, “you’re going to start hearing a lot of rogers.” True enough—pretty much whatever you say, Cranbrook’s (required) response is identical. “Cranbrook radio, your mother wears army boots.” “Roger.” (We didn’t try that one.)

(9) Flying 3+ hours at a time, you’ll likely have to stop for fuel. For me, with grand long-distance flight aspirations, this alone was worth the rating. (Like most students, I’d managed to get my entire license without once stopping at a cardlock fuel pump.) Better late than never.

(10)  Flying 3+ hours with the same person night after night means (a) you’ll get to know your night instructor decently well, including, for instance, why he volunteered to work the vampire shift doing endless airplane circuits, (b) there will be times when even the chattiest pair run dry of things to say and just enjoy the scenery, and (c) you may decide to test out making radio calls in a Bane voice. (The latter is also useful for in-cockpit communications, particularly during simulated emergencies: “Ahhh, I was wondering what would break first!”)

(11) Doing a separate night rating means you have to demonstrate all your same emergencies, just at night. That’s right — straight-in and 180 autorotations, hydraulic failures, engine failures from a hover, stuck pedals, and various system failures and warning lights. If you’re already solid on these you’ll find new challenges doing some of them at night — for others, it’s just good practice.

(12) It’s expensive. Or, as I told my instructor on night two: If I told anyone I’m spending three grand a night, they’d think it must be some bacchanal bottles-and-models rager — not kicking pebbles on the tarmac while you take a whiz at 1:00 am behind a fuel tank.

And after just three (long) nights, the Canadian night rating was, as Tracy says, “done and dusted.”

This means (a) that my Canadian helicopter license has been stripped of its “Day VFR only” restriction, and (b) I can now apply for a full-fledged, unrestricted U.S. commercial license. If only my Blue Book would arrive.

Tangled Up in Blue

Which brings me to the next topic. Transport Canada generously gives itself 90 days (yes, three full agonizing months) to issue the official license booklet. This booklet must be in hand before I apply for my FAA license. Even if I have my Canadian license, my night rating, and passed the FAA written test within two days of landing in the states, I must still wait months for this booklet before I may proceed. That is all on that topic.

Bell 206

During the same few days I was in Abbotsford getting my night rating, I decided to try for my Bell 206 rating as well. As fans of my first-ever post here will recall, the venerable Bell 206 was the first helicopter I ever flew in, way back in August 1984. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s long been my Platonic eidos, the hub among spokes, what comes to mind when I picture a helicopter.

Chinook has a number of 206s in its fleet, and I’ve flown in them a few times throughout my training when I wanted to switch it up, needed a change of pace, or just felt like spending double the money on each flight hour.

They’re undeniably cool machines (figuratively, since not one of the school’s 206s has air conditioning) and I want to fly them.

So I did my 206 rating. This basically means flying a 206 for anywhere from two to 10+ hours (the low end of that typically being for high-time pilots already qualified on various machines) and getting signed off by an instructor and the school. So I had to do all my same flight test exercises and emergencies in the 206: Confined areas, autorotations, emergencies, stuck pedal, off-level landings, and so on.

With one notable exception, I really like flying the 206. It feels solid, heavy, and overbuilt. (Robinsons are heavily used in the private and tour markets, but almost entirely absent from the hardworking bush-flying outfits — one surmises that they’re not built to handle backcountry abuse. The 206 most certainly is.) It’s a time-tested workhorse with pretty much every imaginable issue already sorted out. It’s easy to fly and very easy to autorotate. It just feels smooth, cruising like a Cadillac, not skittish or twitchy. It does what I want it to do and it can handle a whole lot more than that.

So what’s that one notable exception? The seating position. It’s ramrod straight, and totally unadjustable. (Even if you owned the aircraft and could modify the seats, you’d still be out of luck owing to the structural wall behind the front backrests.) What’s more, it’s quite tight on headroom. I’m still not sure I can fit in there with a helmet on — and I know I can in a Robinson. (The latter also has a much more comfortable, slightly reclined seating position.)

So on the last day of my visit, I successfully checked out and earned that coveted 206 rating sticker — and a tiny little sprout of a log entry for ‘turbine time.’

I’m not sure how much 206 flying I’ll actually do over the next while, but it’s a great aircraft. (I’ll have to see if there’s some possible solution to the backrest thing. You might think sticking a lumbar support would help, but the pedals are already too close, so I can’t tolerate a couple inches less legroom.)

Medium Steam Ahead

My next obvious step as I trudge toward glorious victory will be to jump through the various bureaucratic hoops and get my U.S. (FAA) commercial helicopter license later this year (yes, when and if my Transport Canada license booklet ever arrives).

With that, the big push will finally be done: I will be able to curl up atop a pile of certifications whilst contemplating my financial rotor-wash.

I foresee a slowdown in flying for at least a few months while I put my house in order and decide what life as an FAA licensed pilot will actually look like. Having trained in Canada, how will I transition to Bay Area flying? What will that look like — what airports, what aircraft, what cost, and what schedule? All this and more, o reader, remains to be seen.

Toward the He-Dog Run!