Night Flight over the Spanish Coastline

I have had a lot of great flights, I’ve had some with my family, with my friends, lots of different  people that I didn’t meet before and all of them brought me a lot of good experiences. Most of  them have been very pleasant but I have encountered some hard and scary situations too. My name is Yunak, I work as a flight instructor in Madrid, Spain and the flight I'm going to talk  about has been one of the ones that I enjoyed most. It was not a difficult one, we had to plan it well because we were going far and neither my student nor I had ever been there but it wasn't  going to be difficult. It was one of my night flights.

That day my boss sent me to take the plane to have the maintenance done at a workshop that  is quite far from our base and, as we were going, we took the opportunity to give the night  instruction flight to one of my students.

I met with my student a couple of hours before the flight to prepare everything well. We printed the charts, looked at the weather and planned the route we were going to follow. Once we had everything ready we went to the plane and left. We took off fifteen minutes before the sun set and took advantage of the light that was still there to begin the navigation. The first part was easy, we knew the area pretty well and the remaining light was very helpful to follow the route, and it was beautiful. Seeing the sunset from the plane is one of the most wonderful things there is. The colours of the sun reflecting on the clouds, the darkness advancing on the opposite side and, once the sun goes below the horizon, you can see half of the sky dark and the other half shining with very vivid colours. The bad thing is that from there we would have to start navigating without any light and there were no towns or roads to follow in the area that we were going to fly. We had to trust our instruments from that moment. We also knew that we had to cross a big mountain range so we started to climb to 10000ft to avoid the highest peaks. After two hours of navigation we were in complete darkness. There was nothing below and we couldn’t see in front of us, it was hard to believe that we were flying at all but not much later a silhouette began to be seen with a strange white light behind. The moon was rising and it was full.

The silhouette was the mountain range that we had to cross and right after that there was the sea. Once we got to the coast we saw cities again and we realized that we were a bit further south than we should be so we had to follow the coast line to our destination. It was my first time flying in the coast during night time and we were very lucky to have the full moon.

From there we reached our destination without any difficulty. I don't know what made this flight so special but I think it has been one of the flights I liked the most. Everything went smooth and the timings with the sunset and the moon rising were perfect. Also the views were amazing.