On more than one occasion, on a moonless night, over
sparsely populated areas, with lots of stars in the sky and
a similar number of lights on the ground, with those lights
reflecting on the windshield, you can lose all visual sense
of right side up unless you fly by the instruments. This
was a real problem on night coming out eastbound from Denver
Stapleton (long time ago, single pilot demo flight in a
pre-84 P68 Baron). It was totally clear, visibility was
over 100 miles and even though I was IFR, I was being given
traffic at all altitudes, some was participating, some had
transponders and encoding, some didn't. I tried to hand fly
the departure for about 3 or 4 minutes. It was very
difficult, since ATC was forcing me to look outside and
there was nothing outside to see but aircraft lights above,
below and level, all moving. Finally learned to turn the
autopilot ON and let it do the flying while I looked 90% of
the time for the traffic, and monitored the AP with quick
glances.

You get the same loss of visual reference over water with
just a few stars and boats on the water. [JFKjr may have had
this problem]

There is at least one area in NW Arkansas that has a radio
warning about rising terrain.


--
Merry Christmas
Have a Safe and Happy New Year
Live Long and Prosper
Jim Macklin
"Grumman-581" wrote
in message ...
| "George Patterson" wrote in message
news:kFotf.2261$uv.1145@trnddc06...
| Distant lights on the ground often create a "false
horizon" at night.
|
| I was flying back to Houston from Oshkosh a few years
ago... I was somewhere
| over Arkansas at the time... The lights on the ground gave
me the impression
| that there might be mountains around there... I was on
flight following at
| the time, so I asked what the maximum height of the Ozarks
were around
| there... The controller informed me that I was nowhere
near the Ozarks and
| there was no mountains that would be at my altitude...
Very strange visual
| effect...
|
|