Using Spidertracks' Dim LEDs Feature to Make Night Flying Safer
It’s no surprise that night flying presents certain dangers that just aren’t a big concern when you’re flying during the day. Piloting an aircraft under cover of darkness comes with inherent hazards you must be aware of and accommodate for in order to ensure the highest level of safety, such as:
Illusions such as false horizons and the black hole approach. The dark can play some serious tricks on your mind — which obviously isn’t an ideal situation when you’re piloting an aircraft. Illusions such as false horizons (when the mind creates its own faulty horizon in the absence of the clearly visible real thing) and the black hole approach (when the absence of natural or artificial light results in the impression of flying through a ‘black hole’ over a dark area) can cause incidents and must be avoided at all costs.
Depth perception issues. Darkness and night vision can make it difficult to judge distances from and between things, potentially causing problems on approach and landing.
Night vision (decreased vision capability in the dark). The human eye works in such a way that we actually develop a blind spot near the centre of our vision when we’re trying to see in the dark. This means we rely predominantly on peripheral vision to see at night, but it also means our overall visual capacity decreases. Looking at bright lights (as you’d almost certainly be doing when flying at night) can further negatively impact this capacity. Add to all this the fact that your eyes need significantly more time to adjust to the dark than they do to adjust in light, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster if you don’t take the necessary precautions.
Spidertracks’ commitment to safety and to providing our customers with simple solutions to problems led us to develop a feature aimed at making night flying safer while using your Spider. Let’s talk about Dim LEDs.
A competitive feature available with Spidertracks, Dim LEDs enables you to dim the lights on your Spider so your visibility isn’t compromised while you continue to take advantage of Spidertracks’ real-time tracking and communication capabilities.
If your Spider’s running on the latest firmware, simply press and hold the Mark button to dim the lights. When they start to dull, just release the button once you’re satisfied with the brightness.
And there you go: you’re flying as safely as possible at night — both because your visibility’s optimal and you’ve got Spidertracks watching your back.
Read more about Spidertracks’ features, or schedule a demo.
