The Black-Hole Approach

Jim Wolper

Wednesday, January 25, 2023 at 01:45 PM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

"Black-hole approaches" are night landings with insufficient peripheral ground references, leading to pilot disorientation, difficulty judging altitude and attitude, and significantly increasing the risk of accidents like loss of control or controlled flight into terrain.
The author's personal experience highlights how complacency and unexpected factors, such as severe turbulence below pattern altitude, can dangerously complicate these approaches even when ground-level conditions seem calm.
Mitigating the dangers requires meticulous planning, prioritizing instrument flying techniques (e.g., maintaining a constant descent rate) regardless of VFR conditions, always being prepared for a go-around using instrument procedures, and anticipating unattended airport facilities.

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Near Hernandez, N.M., headed south, I noticed the moon rising to my left. It reminded me of Ansel Adams’s iconic 1941 photograph, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. I took out my phone and tried to snap a picture. My more artistic friends might be amused by the effort.

Adams used a large-format camera with a very long exposure. Details on the ground are clear. There’s a tiny village surrounded by scrub land, with hills visible in the distance. My quick exposure through a glare-filled pane of Plexiglas showed none of those details. The ground was completely dark, even though the moon was up.