Category Archives: Flying

Stories about flying — for pleasure or for hire — and the things I’ve learned.

Return to Buckeye, Season 4

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Our fourth trip to Buckeye.

The fine folks at Buckeye Municipal Airport in Buckeye, AZ host the Buckeye Air Fair every year. In past years, the event was held in April, but this year, they decided to move it up to February. They held it this past Saturday.

As the purveyor of helicopter rides at the event, I was happy about the change for a number of reasons:

  • From a performance perspective, I’d get much better aircraft performance on a 65°F day than a 90°F day. It isn’t easy taking off gracefully in a helicopter near max gross weight on 90°F day in a crosswind, even if the airport is only at 1,000 feet MSL.
  • I was less likely to get dehydrated and feel overworked on a cooler day. I normally feel completely drained at the end of the event.
  • I was more likely to be in the area in February than April, since I hoped to get a summer job in Alaska. Those jobs start in April.

There was some confusion at first as to whether we’d be part of the event. My contact wanted us to come, she said that people really looked forward to seeing us there. We were one of the main draws of the event. But another organization had offered to do helicopter rides for free and I certainly couldn’t beat that. When the other organization backed down (smart move on their part), my contact asked if we were still available. We were. I did all the paper work for a business license and vendor contract and we were good to go for the February 16 event.

The big part of this story is our flight from Wickenburg to Buckeye, which was delayed due to (of all things) fog. So we arrived late — after 10 AM. The crowd of potential customers began forming before my blades had stopped. I placed a fuel order and went to hit the Port-o-San while Mike and his assistant set up the landing zone.

Our assistant for the day was Brad, my former flight instructor from Silver State Helicopters. Brad, like more than 800 other people, found himself suddenly unemployed earlier this month when Silver State slammed its doors shut, subsequently declaring Chapter 7 bankruptcy. He’d come to Wickenburg to fly with Mike since then and was available to make some money working for us at the Buckeye event. He’s got his resume out there; if anyone needs a helicopter pilot, I hope they’ll consider him.

My View of BuckeyeBy the time I got back from the can, I there were three helicopter loads waiting to fly. I started right up and let Mike and Brad load my first group of passengers. Here’s what it looked like from my seat; I took this photo with my Treo.

Thus started six hours of almost nonstop flying. In fact, the only time I shut down was when I needed fuel, lunch, and a second toilet break.

By 2 PM, the other vendors — did I mention those? — were packing up. By 3 PM, they were gone. Still, I had a line of passengers waiting to fly.

At 4:15 PM, I did my last ride: a mom and her 3-year-old daughter.

We calculated that we flew more than 70 people that day. More than half were on their very first helicopter ride. About a third were kids aged under 12.

We fueled up one last time, settled our fuel bill, and took off for our return flight to Wickenburg. Our fourth gig at Buckeye had been another great, but tiring, day.

VFR on Top

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Fog in Wickenburg makes for an interesting departure…or two.

On Saturday, I was scheduled to appear at the Buckeye Air Fair in Buckeye, AZ to give helicopter rides. This would be my fourth appearance at this great family event.

The weather on the days leading up to the event was overcast with scattered rain. While rain isn’t too common in the desert, it’s not unheard of. The weather forecast for Saturday was clear with temperatures around 65°F. That’s unseasonably cool, but I’d take it. Winds in Buckeye were forecast at 7 knots from the east shifting to 5 knots from the southwest. Nice.

Fog in Wickenburg?

What the weather forecast didn’t mention was fog. Fog is only slightly more common here than snow. While we can get snow about once every 3 to 5 years, we can get fog once or twice a year. This year’s first encounter with fog was Saturday morning.

I saw it when I woke up at 4 AM. (I’m a naturally early riser; its a curse of middle age.) It was still dark out, but I could barely see the lights from my neighbors’ homes and I couldn’t see the tower normally visible out the back of our house. I’ll fly at night or in rain or in high winds. But I can’t fly in the fog.

I went about my morning routine. The sky brightened. We were in a thick fog. Visibility was about 1/2 mile.

Mike woke up, had breakfast, and fed the horses. By then, it was 7 AM, time to head to the airport. But I still couldn’t see beyond the hills immediately around our house. It was definitely not flying weather.

We packed up a cooler with bottled water, soda, some snacks, and ice. We took the Jeep to the gas station and filled it up — not because we needed it for the event, but because I, as usual, had run it until the Low Fuel light came on. Then we headed over to the airport to load and prepare the helicopter.

The visibility there was the same, if not worse.

I did a good preflight, taking my time. Mike loaded the cooler, paperwork, signs, and other paraphernalia into the back seat area. There was no reason to rush. Even though we were going to be late, I couldn’t take off in the fog.

We towed the helicopter out to the fuel pumps and took on 12 gallons. Fuel is cheaper in Buckeye, so we figured we’d fuel up there. It would also be a good way to support the airport that was hosting the event. (I wound up buying 88.8 gallons of 100LL at Buckeye that day, coming home with full tanks.)

Playing the Waiting Game

Ed, one of my mechanics, came by. He has a classic Taylorcraft Sport airplane and planned to fly it down to Buckeye and put it on display. But he didn’t like the look of the weather, either. He, Mike, and I spent about 30 minutes standing near his hangar, chatting, watching the fog thicken and thin out and thicken again.

A helicopter flew by overhead, completely out of sight above the fog layer. That told me that the fog wasn’t very thick.Helicopters don’t normally make a habit of flying in clouds less than 1,000 feet off the ground. No aircraft does.

I went into the terminal to use the facilities and chat with the FBO guy, Roark. By now, it was 8:15 AM. I was supposed to be in Buckeye at 9 AM. Buckeye was about 40 minutes away by air. I made a few calls to let the people who were waiting on us know that we’d be late. I also called the automated weather observation system for Phoenix Sky Harbor, which is reachable by telephone, and listened to the recording. Visibility 10 miles. Scattered clouds at 1200 feet AGL; overcast at 3000 AGL. In other words, the weather down in Phoenix wasn’t bad at all.

While Roark and I were chatting, an airplane called in, coming from the north. His transmission was difficult to read, but what we eventually understood was that it was clear where he was. He wanted to know what the cloud ceilings were at Wickenburg. The way I saw it, we were in a cloud — ceilings were zero.

When the plane landed at Moreton Field, a dirt strip at a residential airpark three miles north of Wickenburg Municipal, I began to wonder whether the weather might actually be better than it looked. And that’s when I realized that the fog was lifting — I could actually see at least a mile and the dim outlines of the mountains 15 miles to the north were coming through the haze.

Our First Departure

I went out and started up the helicopter. Mike joined me as I was warming it up. We could see the full length of the 6050-foot runway and what lay beyond it when we took off.

At the airport, Roark and Ed were listening for reports. I climbed to just below cloud level — perhaps 400 feet up. When we got to the river, the clouds around us melted away. It was a beautiful, clear, sunny day to the north. I reported all this on the radio.

Unfortunately, we needed to go south. I decided to follow the river and Grand Avenue until we broke out of the fog bank.

It was a tense few minutes. Visibility varied from more than a mile to about 1/4 mile. Every time visibility got low and I considered turning around, it would suddenly open up, giving me confidence about moving forward. I was flying at 2300 MSL — below airport elevation. We could never get more than 300 or 400 feet off the ground because the cloud level was right there. This was scud running, pure and simple.

Then, about 8 miles south of town over Grand Avenue, I suddenly realized that if I continued forward, I’d be in a cloud. I dropped the collective, pulled back on the cyclic, and started a slow, sharp turn. Clouds surrounded us, but I kept sight of the ground. The five seconds it took to make my 180° turn seemed like ten minutes. But then we were flying back the way we’d come.

It wasn’t until I was back in town that I could make another radio report to Wickenburg Airport. I was too low for my signal to reach them through the mountains south of town. We continued north along the river until the cloud bank opened up again. Then I climbed steeply to take a look at the situation from up above.

Low Clouds at WickenburgWe got above the cloud tops at 3000 feet. At 3200 feet MSL, the clouds looked like a fluffy blanket of cotton with Vulture Peak, Twin Peaks, and, far to the south, the bulk of the White Tank Mountains sticking out the top. It was absolutely beautiful.

Mike and I briefly discussed flying VFR on top. For those of you who aren’t pilots, this means flying using visual references, but above the clouds. The conditions for this were perfect — there were no other clouds above the ones we were already above, so there was no danger of flying into other clouds. There were ground references in the form of mountains poking through the clouds. But there were two problems with this:

  1. I’d never flown VFR on top and wasn’t very comfortable with the idea.
  2. If we had an engine failure, we’d have to drop through clouds that might reach all the way to the ground, making it impossible to find a suitable landing spot.

I descended back beneath the clouds. For a few minutes, I thought we might try heading west, but by the time we reached the airport again, I realized that visibility out that way wasn’t much better than at the airport. So we decided to land and wait it out.

Remember, there are old pilots and bold pilots but very few old, bold pilots.

More Waiting

On the ground, there was a man with a Piper Cub who was hoping to leave Wickenburg and fly to Tucson. He was in the same situation as us, since he needed to go south. I told him about the cloud tops and the nice day above them. He had an instrument rating, but his aircraft was not properly equipped for IFR (instrument flight rules) flight. So, like us, he decided to wait.

Time marched on.

I called Phoenix’s AWOS again. Still 10 miles visibility down there. Then I called Brad, who was working ground crew for us at Buckeye. He said it was overcast, but otherwise clear. The event was just starting to get under way, with lots of people coming in. I think he had a hard time believing that the conditions at Wickenburg could be bad enough to keep me on the ground.

At 9:15, I could wait no longer. The sky had brightened considerably and I was sure whatever clouds were left would burn off quickly. I was also sure that the VFR on top route we’d glimpsed would have plenty of holes with views to the ground. So I decided to give it another try.

Our Second Departure

While I warmed up the helicopter again, we heard radio calls from pilots coming into Wickenburg from the north. Some of them were on their way to Buckeye and, like us, were concerned about the cloud cover. They’d decided to stop in Wickenburg and wait it out.

The Cub guy had decided, like us, to go for it. He taxied down to the end of Runway 23 to depart. We took off, climbed out about 300 feet, and turned to the south. At first, I planned to follow Vulture Mine Road under the clouds. But when we saw how the clouds came down to the road level just south of Rancho de los Caballeros, I changed my plan. Instead, I made a 1300 FPM climb at about 60 knots right through the biggest hole I saw in the clouds. We popped out the top into the sunshine, will all the nearby mountain peaks clearly in view. Seeing the huge White Tank Mountains, which weren’t far from our destination, helped convince me that a VFR on top route would be okay.

I punched Buckeye into my GPS, adjusted our course, leveled off at 4000 feet MSL, and accelerated to 110 knots.

Mike took this excellent shot of Vulture Peak as we flew by it.

The cloud tops were about 500 feet below us as we moved south. There were plenty of big holes in the clouds offering clear views of the desert below us.

We reached the edge of the fog bank about 20 miles south of Wickenburg. I made a radio call to the Cub pilot to let him know the clouds stopped there. He was still on frequency and thanked me for the report. We descended to my usual altitude of 600 feet AGL and continued on our way with the low clouds behind us.

By the time we got to Buckeye, there were a few clouds scattered in a hazy sky. A cloud bank remained to the west and to the north through most of the day. But by the time we returned to Wickenburg much later that afternoon, the low clouds were gone.

Work: Feast or Famine

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An empty summer packs up quickly.

Less than a week ago, on the morning of Friday, February 8, I was looking at a pretty empty summer season. I had one book contract lined up — an annual revision I usually work in in June and July — and no idea where or even if I’d be flying for someone else during the April through September timeframe I’d set aside for Alaska.

Two other books had been dangled in front of me on and off for the past two months. If I got them, they’d keep me busy from now until the summer time. But it didn’t look as if I’d get them.

And while I was hoping to spend the entire summer flying for someone else in Alaska, the recent demise of Silver State Helicopters dumped all of their CFIs (certified flight instructors) on the job market. If any of them had 1,000 hours (or said they had 1,000 hours), they’d be lined up for the few entry level jobs at the Grand Canyon, Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska. My experience level is a bit higher than entry level for those jobs, so employers would have to pay me more. Why pay for steak when hamburger will do? Despite four resumes out there in the land of the midnight sun, my phone remained silent. So it didn’t look as if I’d be going to Alaska after all.

And that was the state of things last Friday morning.

A Telephone Call Changes the Scene

I did have one other resume out in the wild: I’d sent it about a month before to an Illinois-based Part 135 operator. They were looking for a full time pilot to help them with a special contract and then do odd flying jobs as needed in the midwest. (And yes, I’m being purposely vague. Last week’s fiasco has put me into high caution mode.) I exchanged a few e-mails with the owner, who said that a contract pilot — which is what I’d prefer — might work out better for him. He told me to call him. I did, but never seemed to get him on the phone. I waited for him to call. He didn’t. I sent him an e-mail, asking if the job had been filled; if it had, I’d stop bothering him. He wrote back to say the job wasn’t filled, he was definitely interested in me, but he was swamped with work. He’d call. He didn’t. All this happened during the course of a month.

On Friday, I decided to call again. I wanted to either cross off this opportunity or bring it into the realm of possibility. I got the owner on the phone. We hit it off right away. I got the feeling he’d spoken to a few other people about the job and they weren’t interested in some of the more unusual aspects. (Again, I’m being vague on purpose; I don’t want anyone to screw this up for me.) I also got the feeling he was being inundated with resumes from Silver State casualties of Chapter 7 — guys who have earned their 1,000 hours in a simulator or as an active passenger during dual instruction flights. He wanted someone with experience flying passengers for hire, which I’ve been doing since 2001. We joked around a little. He told me that mid-month, he would fly me up to his base for a face-to-face meeting and a chance for me to see their equipment. I assume a flight would also be part of the interview process.

I hung up the phone feeling good. This opportunity had gone from a long shot to a 75% or more chance of getting the job. And without going into details, I can assure you that the job will be very interesting, with plenty to blog about — if I’m allowed to.

Two More Calls, Three More Books?

Product ImageMy phone rang on Monday morning. It was one of my editors. He’s been swamped since the holidays and has just dug out of the pile of work on his desk. He pulled one of the dangling books out of the air and slapped it on the negotiation table. We talked terms, we agreed. (My co-author on the book agreed yesterday.) I’m looking for a contract in the mail any day now. Time frame? Well, the book is already listed on Amazon.com, so I guess I’d better get to work on it soon.

He also dangled that other book around some more, but no decision was made. We didn’t even talk terms. So although I can’t count on it yet, it’s definitely still in the picture.

Yesterday, I got another call from another editor I work with regularly. She flat-out offered me a book deal with terms that would be tough to turn down. So I said yes. The contract should come within the next week or so. Timeframe: late summer. Sorry; no details will be forthcoming anytime soon.

What’s good about all this is that I have enough writing work lined up to support me through the summer, when Flying M Air continues to incur expenses but does not incur much (if any) revenue.

Another Call with another Flying Possibility

Between the two editor calls, I got a call from a California-based Part 135 helicopter operator. They’d seen my helicopter forum post that had a subject line like “Single Pilot Part 135 Operator with Helicopter Available for Summer Months.” This guy is interested in expanding his business to offer a major city’s commuters with helicopter transportation into that city from the suburbs. (Yes, I’m being vague again; jeez, I hate this.) Rather than invest in a lot of equipment and train pilots, he thinks we might work together with me and my helicopter subcontracted by his organization to provide the flights. If things work out, he’ll expand; if they don’t, no serious money lost.

While this is very interesting to me, I’m worried that there won’t be enough revenue in it to support me and my aircraft. After all, I’d have to relocate for the entire summer and the city in question ain’t exactly cheap to live in. But it is a really nice city, one I wouldn’t mind living in at all. I told him about my other opportunity and how I wanted to pursue that first. He said that if that job didn’t work out and I was still available, I should call him in a month or so to talk about flying for him.

I’m calling that “Summer Job Plan C.”

Plan D, I should mention, is cherry drying in Washington State, which, as usual, is always dangling out there but never quite attainable.

Today

My helicopter calendar has a few — but not many — things on it. I’ll be doing rides at the Buckeye Air Fair again on Saturday. I picked up a Sky Harbor Charter for March with some folks who already told me they want another day trip when they come to Wickenburg. And I have a Wickenburg area tour prebooked through a tour company for March 1.

The Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure simply is not selling. It could be my limited marketing budget. But I can’t see paying $10-$15K for a magazine advertisement if it’ll take the sale of more than 10 excursions just to pay for the ad. (The trip really is a smoking deal and I don’t make much money on it.)

But I do have some possibilities on desert racing aerial photography gigs lined up for March and April. We’ll see how that goes. The ferry cost is hard for most of those companies to swallow. I’d do a lot better with race photography gigs if I’d relocate to Lake Havasu or Bullhead City. (And believe me, I’m thinking about it.)

Today, I’m finishing up an article I started on Monday for FileMaker Advisor magazine. Then I’m going to work on my outline for my half of our WordPress book revision. If I finish that before the end of the day, I’ll finish up my series of articles about using Viddler with WordPress. And maybe — just maybe — I’ll record another video blog entry.

But only if I can do something with my hair.

Readers Cause Trouble

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Why I had to take a post offline.

About two weeks ago, I wrote one of my typical flying posts, where I described an unusual flying gig. In the post, I described how I was hired by a company to help them find some lost items in a remote area.

Do I sound vague? It’s because I apparently have to be.

The post was read about 330 times. That’s all. It was Dugg twice.

Yet that was enough for at least three people to track down my client in their remote location, trespass on their private property, cause a nuisance for workers, and put themselves at risk of harm in a work zone. One of these people actually showed up twice.

Why? That’s what I want to know. Apparently they thought they could get some kind of reward if they found the missing items — which aren’t even missing anymore!

One of the trespassers told my client he heard about the lost items on this blog. My client found the post, read it, and then called me, asking me to remove it.

This is my client. I’ve worked for them on three occasions and would like to work for them again. Obviously, I did as they wished. I was ashamed and embarrassed that they had to call me about it.

And that’s why other pilots won’t be able to read about this unusual flying gig.

Is this going to happen again? Am I going to have to remove something I wrote about because readers thought my coverage was an open invitation to be a nuisance to someone else?

Do you know how many things I haven’t written about because I was worried that something like this would happen?

Or how many times I purposely kept details vague — or even lied about them — to prevent people from doing something I would have to regret?

I don’t know who caused this problem — other than me, of course — and I don’t want to know. But I hope the people who bothered my clients are reading this and I hope they have enough sense to stay away from my client’s private property in the future.

Lights at Night

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I don’t get it.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Wickenburg, where I live, is the dark night skies. But as time goes on, that darkness is getting ever lighter.

Streetlights

We live on the edge of town where the homes are spread out and there’s lots of space between them. There’s no real “road” to get to our home. Instead, there’s an easement that neither the county nor the town want to maintain for us. It’s a steep, dirt road that is best climbed at at least 15 mph or, if you’re in a pickup truck, with 4WD turned on. There are only three homes that use the road and, unfortunately, not all of the occupants or visitors understand how to get up the hill without spinning their wheels. As a result, the road is usually full of mounds and ditches and can be quite a challenge to negotiate with a low slung car, like my little Honda S2000. Periodically, one of my neighbors, who owns a Bobcat, grades the road to make it smooth again. This is a good thing because the vast majority of traffic goes to his house.

Anyway, because we live on the edge of town in a place that used to be outside of town limits, and because we don’t have a real road, we also don’t have streetlights. That’s a great thing. Streetlights are a huge waste of resources and a nuisance to dark-sky lovers. Although they might be appropriate in downtown areas or areas where houses are snugged in close together, there’s really no reason for them beyond that.

If you’re a city dweller reading this, you probably think I’m nuts. You look at streetlights as a way to cut down crime, to keep the streets safer at night. But in Wickenburg — at least so far — crime is not a serious problem and we don’t worry about muggers and rapists lurking in the dark. Besides, very few people walk the streets at night and, if they do, they usually carry a flashlight. Of course, Arizona is also an open carry state, so quite a few of us honest citizens might just be carrying guns for self-protection. (I have a concealed weapon permit and a gun that could easily fit in my purse or pocket, should I decide to carry it.)

Some of the newer neighborhoods in town have installed streetlights. That’s unfortunate because it just adds to the overall glow of the town against the night sky. One of the newer neighborhoods in town chose street level lighting instead of overhead lighting. That’s a pretty good compromise. The lights are installed behind glass blocks in consistently designed decorative boxes at the end of each driveway. The boxes include the house number and mailbox. The lights aren’t very bright, but they do offer an easy to follow pathway down the road for anyone who happens to be on foot after nightfall. They also make it easy to find a specific house in the day or night.

Business Lights, Park Lights

There was a huge outcry in town years ago when a new gas station on the main road installed bright lights over its pumps. The lighting was poorly designed and shined not only down, but up. It was like walking into a 7-11 (or Circle K, depending on where you live) at night — except all that brightness was outside. You could see the gas station from quite a distance away because of its glow. The complaints did some good because the lighting was redesigned and adjusted. It’s not as bad anymore, although it’s still pretty bright.

Another new gas station on the other side of town is painfully bright, but since I no longer read the local paper, I don’t know if people have been complaining about it.

Wickenburg has several parks, each of which has at least one ball field. The lights over the fields are high and bright. That’s a good thing, if there’s a night game going on. In most cases, the lights are only turned on when there’s a game going. I think they might be on a timer to turn off automatically after a certain amount of time, because I’ve never noticed them on very late at night. That’s a good thing, too. Lighting like that must cost a fortune to operate, and townspeople already piss away enough tax dollars on wasteful spending by our Mayor and Council. (Don’t get me started about the pink sidewalks or man-made tourist attractions.)

Airport Lights

The airport, of course, has night lighting. There are a bunch of overhead lights around the ramp and hangar area. They’re the old kind that shine down until you need them — then they apparently overheat and go out for a while, leaving you in shadows. When you’re done fumbling in the semidarkness, the nearest light goes back on. These lights are on a timer and, like most lights on timers, when there are power outages, the timers get screwed up and don’t work at the right time. When I ran the airport FBO, I discovered that the lights were going on about 3 hours later than they should have and staying on well past the time they should have been turned off. I whined to the town and eventually they sent someone to fix it. They’ve made some changes to the airport lighting since then and I hope they put them on a light sensor.

The airport also has a rotating beacon on a tower that has recently be adorned with cellular antennas. (I still wonder how they got that one past the FAA.) It has a green light on one side and a white light on on the other. It rotates, sending off a flash of white and a flash of green at a predetermined interval, which I probably should know but don’t. It’s triggered by a light sensor, so it automatically goes on at night and off in the morning. I love the way the rotating motor sounds in the predawn hours when I sometimes come to the airport to fly.

The runway lights are handled differently. It’s pilot controlled lighting (PCL) that works by pressing the mike button while tuned into Wickenburg Airport’s frequency. I think it’s supposed to be 3 clicks for low intensity, 5 clicks for medium, and 7 clicks for high. I’m not sure if it really works this way; it seems to me that 3 clicks is never enough to get them going and with 5 clicks, the taxiway lights don’t always come on. The airport’s runway lighting was improved when the runway was lengthened. They start out white on the approach end, then turn yellow about midway down the runway and are red near the end. It really helps pilots get a feel for the runway length. Very nice.

This photo by Jon Davison, is a cool night shot from the back seat of my helicopter as I landed, with Mike beside me, at Wickenburg Airport not long after sunset.

One of my favorite things to do when I fly at night is to approach the airport and get within 2 or 3 miles before turning on the lights. I love to watch the runway light up. I know airline pilots who play the same game on cross-country trips. Seven clicks on the right frequency must make a good show from 35,000 feet.

One annoying thing about the new runway lighting is the strobe lights on either end. Called Runway End Identifier Lights (REILs), they provide “positive identification of the approach end of a particular runway.” (I looked that up in the Aeronautical Information Manual; you can find it in section 2-1-3.) The trouble is, they’re designed for airplanes, which don’t have a particularly good view of the ground. A helicopter pilot, with a wide open view of everything in front of the helicopter, gets those flashes of light right in the eyes when landing at night. Good thing I don’t make as shallow an approach as airplane pilots do; I’d probably be blinded if I came in on the glide slope.

The people who buy homes at either end of the runway — where Wickenburg’s decision makers have stupidly allowed homes to be built — will have these flashing lights blinking in their bedrooms or kitchens or living rooms every time a plane lands or departs at night. To paraphrase Mr. T, “I pity the fool” who buys a home at the runway end.

House Lights

But the kind of lighting I really don’t understand is the outside lights many people have on their homes. Yes, it’s nice to have a light over your garage or front door for when you come in late at night. And it’s nice to have a light in your backyard, for when you barbeque or let the dog out. But come on, guys. Do you need all those damn lights turned on all night long?

One of my neighbors is an example. They live high on a hill and have three bright lights that I can see from my home. These lights are on all night long. How do I know? I’m sometimes up in the middle of the night and I can clearly see them from my front window: three spots of yellowish light, shining into the night. Why?

A closer neighbor also illuminates his house all night long, but at least there’s some sensibility to his setup. He’s got adjustable motion-sensitive lighting. When nothing’s moving, the lights are at a dim setting — just enough to see the house. When something moves by a light, it goes bright. While this makes more sense than keeping bright lights on all night long, my question is this: if there’s nothing moving outside, what’s the sense of having any lights on at all? And it does nothing to explain the bright light over his garage that’s also on all night.

Lights at Night
I took this shot last night, at about 8 PM. These are homes of my closest neighbors. In the original shot — not downsized for the Web — you could see the pinpoints of stars in the black sky.

A new house in the neighborhood that’s on an adjacent hill had a very bright light that pointed right at our house. It was on every night right after the electricity was turned on, even though no one yet lived in the house. It was so bright at our house that it cast shadows inside our house. I was on the verge of introducing myself and asking them to do something about it when they suddenly stopped using it. Now, there’s another new house between that one and ours, on the same hill. I wonder how they’ll like that bright light when it’s turned on. But they had their porch lights on all last night, illuminating the hill in a spray of light. I wonder how long that’ll last.

Our house is usually so dark at night that if you came down our easement road and didn’t know the house was here, you wouldn’t see it. We have two motion-controlled spotlights: one over the garage and one by the front door. They go on and off at night when it’s windy; I think the swaying saguaro cactus sets them off. They’ll also go on if an animal, like a coyote or javelina or mule deer, wanders into the yard. Oddly enough, they seem a bit sluggish when we walk outside at night. But eventually they go on to do their jobs, ensuring that no one can approach or depart without being illuminated. When nothing’s moving, they’re dark.

Think about Energy Use!

One of the things we all should be thinking about these days is energy use. Let’s face it: if you have a light on all night, it’s using energy all night. And do you really need to be throwing away energy (or energy dollars) when you’re not using the light?

So it’s not just the loss of dark night skies that concern me. It’s the excessive use of energy for no good reason.

How is your home or town illuminated at night? What lights can you turn off or replace with motion sensor lights? How much energy or money do you think you could save? What have you already done or observed? Your comments and insights are welcome. Use the Comments link or form for this post to share your thoughts.