My First Officer this month, Marshall B______, is from a generations old Maryland family that included a Supreme Court Justice. Marshall’s father was an officer in the Navy and Marshall came to the right seat of my airplane from an Air Force KC-135 aerial refueling tanker. He was the navigator and knows something about celestial navigation so it is fun to pick his brain on that subject. He was stationed for a time at Castle AFB in Atwater, California, which is not far from my family’s roots, and flying on B-52s. Anyhow. he’s a little green as a co-pilot and not too sure of himself yet. I have to reaffirm what they taught about aircraft systems in ground school and coach him a little bit sometimes. When approaching an airport at night he asks me things like: “Where is it?” and, “So there’s our runway over there, right?” “Call my turn for me, alright?” At first I thought it was just insecurity and thinking out loud. But then I realized that he doesn’t see so well at night. You soon formulate opinions about your crew especially from the confines of a cramped cockpit. You watch for strengths and weakness. After all, your career and not to mention safety depend on it. There were subtle hints like the CRT screens on his side of the instrument panel adjusted to full intensity and only dimmed slightly after it was pitch black outside. He boasted to me that his vision was better then best with acuity measured at 20/07. Wow. I’m impressed. (Didn’t I hear somewhere that people with perfect eyesight sometimes have difficulty with night vision?) Approaching the Dulles airport (~7 miles out) in the middle of the night and his leg he says, “Ah, could I get some landing lights on here please?” Sure. No prob.’. I reached to the overhead panel for the three rocker switches; left landing, right landing, taxi light. Click. Click. Click. (technical note: these lights are mounted to the nose gear strut ) He had forgotten that the lights would not be effective as the landing gear had not yet been lowered. I mockingly reminded him of this by saying, “There. Oh! That’s sure a lot better.” And then after he had realized his mistake and understood that all he had succeeded in doing was to bathe the closed nose gear wheel well with a zillion candlepower, I said laughing, “Boy! You really made those mice and cockroaches in there scramble for the crevices.”

On our way west (my leg), Marshall and I fly toward the brilliant sunset. He explains to me how the celestial charts call for a heavy duty correction for refractive error during sun sights at this shallow zenith. We squint into the bright orange glow, the lower circumference of which is beginning to distort and flatten. “You see? At the very last we are not seeing the true sun at all but merely a reflection in the earth’s thick atmosphere. A mirage`.” Hmmm. Cool! I leave my dark glasses on, even as the sky quickly darkens toward night during our approach for landing in Dayton, Ohio. I do this every once in a dull while just for grins and to relieve the cockpit tedium. I like to wait and see if my crew notices or says anything. Will they be assertive or questioning? It got a rise out of Marshall. “You’ve still got your sun glasses on.” That’s right. This is going to be a dark night approach, I said in my best mono-tone matter of fact voice. “Oh. Are those like the kind that lighten up automatically?”, he asked nervously. Two darkness challenged pilots at the controls. Look out below! Humming the Corey Hart lyrics