Thanks Jean-Marie for your interesting contribution. I hope that you
agree that you have to be a little bit crazy to want to fly a glider at
night! I have flown single-engine at night and find it hard to believe
that VFR night is permissible - if you have no visual frame of
reference, you're flying IFR in my book.

Although I never ever want to fly a glider at night, I have found
myself in the unfortunate situation at the end of a long cross-country
flight where dissipating clouds delayed my final glide until I
completed my final 100 km over unlandable terrain as sunset approached.
Out here in the western USA, you are often left with the only viable
option of flying till after sunset to land at a safe field. This means
landing before nightfall, but occasionally after sunset.

Rather than not post these flights in a public forum, I think it is
valuable to share the information about what can happen, even to
conservative pilots with well-planned flights. I also don't think it's
very useful to accuse pilots who may have made a bad call on a task of
doing so with the intent of cheating or being unsportsmanlike.
Cross-country soaring involves a lot of judgement calls and sometimes a
bit of risk taking. I'm not sure this is entirely a bad thing.

I suspect that all cross-country soaring pilots violate flight
regulations from time to time - whether it be an inadvertent climb
above 18,000 feet, crossing an airspace boundary, or getting too close
to clouds or people. I just think we should be more forgiving and less
judgemental.

Mike

Mike