Instrument Training at night? Good Idea or not?

wrote in message
oups.com...
What are your thoughts on instrument training at night? Personally I
don't fly at night and have only for what was required for my PPSEL.
However my goal is to go on to my Commerical and CFI after the
Instrument.
So, I guess my question comes down to added risk. How much additional
risk am I taking by doing some of my Instrument at night?

The main thing with flying at night in a single-engine aircraft is that life
is less encouraging when it comes to engine failures. This said, though, I
can't see that it's really more risky flying on a nice, clear night than,
say, flying single-engine in daytime IMC with a low cloud base.

The main thing to be sure of is that your instructor is experienced and
extremely competent with night flying. Again, no surprises here - if you're
doing an IMC course in real IMC you'd want your instructor to have loads of
experience. The trick is to be confident that (a) they're sharp enough to
stop you getting into trouble; and (b) if, by some misfortune, they were
looking at the map while you got yourself into an inverted, screaming
descent, they'll be able to get you out of it.

I was fortunate in that my IMC instructors were both several-thousand-hours
ex-commercial pilots who had thousands of hours of hands-on IMC between them
(i.e. none of this namby-pamby auto-land stuff for the ex- Hunter and Fokker
50 pilot, and lots of nice North Sea weather for the helicopter captain :-)
Sadly I can only fly at night with an instructor because the CAA thinks I'm
too colour-blind, but it's immense fun and the views are awesome.

D.