In article Kmw1c.128621$Hy3.30256@edtnps89,
Marc Lattoni wrote:

Just wondering, how many VFR only pilots have and USE a night rating?

Well, I'm in the US, so there is no special rating. Flying at night
makes me a little uneasy because 1) enroute, even if you are conservative
in your flightplanning, there is a good chance that a forced landing is
going to be on unknown (until you hit it!) terrain, and 2) there are
plenty of things to hit out there once you are descending into your
destination airport.

While flying off the insurance requirement for my Comanche my CFI and
I did a day cross country to Roseburg (RBG) that qualified for the
Commercial requirement. Looking at:

http://www.topozone.com/map.asp?lat=....356333&size=l

You can see that it is surrounded by hills, obstructing the traffic
pattern on both sides. The hills are big enough to obscure your
view of the entire airport valley on downwind (assuming you're wide
of them). At night you might be tempted to fly a downwind directly
over them if you didn't know they were there. To give you some idea,
the instrument approaches to this aiport have MDAs ranging from 1200'AGL
to 2000'AGL. It doesn't look as imposing on a sectional.

Anyway, a few days later, needing to burn off a few more hours, I decided
to satisfy my night commercial XC. I was about to fly the same plan
when I started thinking about what it would be like to arrive at Roseburg
at night...

--
Ben Jackson

http://www.ben.com/