A Late Night Date

Micah and I had a fun late night date last night. Any time spent alone with your husband is a date, right? We had an unusual and fun time together. Micah is a pilot, but he is also the wing chief of flight safety. That means he is responsible for keeping all the flyers aware of safety concerns, etc. We went out to check out some red LED lights on the wind generators. A crew of Canadian pilots just about ran into one and determined that their night vision goggles weren't picking up the particular shade of red that the LED lights were emitting. Micah heard that there were some close to us. We drove about 45 minutes south west of Minot to find these wind generators that had these particular lights on them. The idea was to try to photograph them with and without the night vision goggles. I was a bit skeptical, but it worked! And was kind of amazing. The photos are very amateurish and not technically correct but you'll get the idea. I don't know how to take a good picture in the dark of night. And it is kind of tricky trying to photograph flashing red lights. But here are our best efforts.


This is a picture of the lights on the wind generators. It looks like there are two, right?




Nope, check it out with the night vision goggles. There are 5 there!! Only two had lights on them.


This next picture is of the town but also the large white blob in the center is a large antenna. It had a bright "halo" from 2 miles away than the generators did being 500 feet away.





This is the antenna taken from about 500 feet.

And here is the antenna with the NVG's. The antenna has regular incandescent bulbs. They are much brighter.

And here is my attempt at a side by side shot. You can see that the antenna has a much brighter halo. It was quite fascinating.

Overall we determined that yes, they are visible but they can cause a major hazard. The pilots could potentially miscalculate the distance from the wind generators because of the smaller light put out. They could assume that the wind turbines are much further away than they actually are. This is particularly important for helicopters doing low level tactical night flying. The generators are about 300 feet tall and they fly under 500. A big potential problem. Kind of cool. It was fun, but it was a late late night. I'm too old to stay up past midnight!