Flying Into Total Darkness, Inside the Cow

The airplane disappears behind trees, reappears, turns, seems to aim straight for the startled stargazers on the shore.

Peter Garrison

Tuesday, February 14, 2023 at 05:08 PM ET

Verified

[Credit: Adobe Stock]

Key Takeaways:

A pilot with limited instrument training crashed his plane into a wilderness lake at night, shortly after takeoff, due to severe disorientation.
The disorientation was caused by total darkness, a moonless night, and the complete absence of ground lights, effectively creating instrument flight conditions even if the pilot did not enter clouds.
Contributing factors included the pilot's lack of experience with true wilderness night flying and inadequate instrument proficiency, leading to an inability to maintain control when visual references disappeared.
The incident underscores the critical danger of "total darkness" as a potent disorienting factor, often underestimated by pilots accustomed to flying with some ground lighting.

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An hour before midnight. The stillness of a northern Minnesota lake. Ripples on pebbles exposed in the water, reboantic loons. Darkness. Starlight.

Then suddenly, close by, the incongruous snarl of an airplane engine. Red and green lights race into view, swooping and plunging. The airplane disappears behind trees, reappears, turns, seems to aim straight for the startled stargazers on the shore. It veers away, zooms upward. Its lights become momentarily hazy and diffuse. The airplane again turns, dives, disappears behind trees. Then a dreadful sound, part boom, part thud, for which there is no name. And then silence.