Today we flew the required night cross-country flight to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. If you knew what you were looking for you could probably see all the way to Murfreesboro once we got to 5,500 feet. The cities on the way were lit up pretty good and the sky was pretty clear. I flared too high (compensating for yesterday when I kept landing too early) and we dropped about a foot to the ground in the hardest landing I’ve made so far. We kept rolling and took off and headed back south.
Aaron had me do hood flying on the way back so I couldn’t see out the window. He let me use the GPS to navigate and we made it back alright. In the 10 miles or so I started having trouble keeping lined up with the GPS as I descended, so when I took the hood off I wasn’t pointed directly to the airport. There is very little lighting to the North of the airport so it looks like a sea of nothingness with some airport lights at the end. This made me really careful about my slip (we were a little high) as it seemed without reference to the horizon, keeping the nose sufficiently low to prevent a stall would be tricky. It turned out to be one of my better slips though probably because of how careful I was being.
We used flight following both ways and talked to Huntsville, Memphis, and Nashville controllers.
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