It gives a very special feeling taking off and climbing into the black black sky. All the lights seems to get smaller and smaller., the moving white lights of the cars are moving slower and slower.
It's almost scary how dark and silent it really is if you fly away from congested area with no lights on the ground at all, only your aircraft in the dark sky together with a lot of other airtraffic.
It's amazing how many planes (and helicopters) are still in the air at night.
When you're on the ground you don't realise there's still so many traffic flying around.
With all the light pollition it's hard to see but once airborne it's even more easy to spot all the traffic at night than by day.
Flying at night is more easy in a way that there is no thermal turbulence at all, the air is very smooth and it's 'relatively cold' (still 30° this night).
The only (dangerous) thing is that you have some visual illusions.
One of them is the 'blackhole' effect.
If you're approaching an airfield, coming from a very dark sky with not really visual references (doing on approach from over sea for exemple) you can think you're too high.
A logic reaction would be to pitch down and descent; this will bring yourself below the 'normal' glidepath. This can be very dangerous when you have high terrain around you.
Some pic's when I was doing my pre-flight.
