26 January, block off 17:18. From here on the logbook carries an entry that was never there before: night. Night from 18:05, three of the six landings counted as night landings.

The night VFR training begins. At the end of January the sun sets in eastern Austria shortly after half past four — so you take off in twilight and land in darkness, and the interesting part lies exactly in between.

Flying at night is not flying by day with less light. The horizon disappears, and with it the reference you have read every attitude from since the first flight. You fly on instruments and still by sight, height above the ground can no longer be estimated, and the approach turns into an exercise in interpreting points of light.

Six landings that evening, three of them in the dark. The start of a new chapter, eight weeks after the test.

144 km, 50 minutes, and 6,532 ft — the second-highest altitude since the Alpine flight in August, and the highest at night in the book. Night from 17:40, one night landing.

Night navigation is a completely different discipline from navigating by day. By day you take your bearings from woods, fields, the courses of rivers. At night all of that is gone — what remains are villages as islands of light, roads as chains of lamps, and between them large black areas with nothing in them.

Above 6,500 ft in early February, in the dark: that is an uncomfortable place to be in an unheated light aircraft cabin. In return the Vienna Basin lies below you as a glowing net, the black block of the Alps stands in the west, and the visibility reaches as far as Bratislava.

Block off 17:08, 150 km, 50 minutes, over Vienna and out to the Danube near Tulln. A pure night flight, one landing.

Vienna at night from 3,300 ft is one of those things that make the night rating worth having on its own: the Ring as a bright circle, the Danube as a black band straight through the lights, the bridges as strings of pearls across it, and all around the suburbs that simply do not stop.

As flying it is work all the same. Above a brightly lit city you lose the horizon in a sea of lights, and every bit of orientation you draw from the shape of the landscape by day has to be read at night from the pattern of the lighting.

109 km, 45 minutes, six landings, 2,568 ft. Night circuits on a Thursday evening.

Six night landings in a row are the core exercise of the whole rating. By day you judge your height above the runway from the picture the ground makes. At night that picture does not exist — there are two rows of lights, and the flare has to come out of them.

So it is repeated until it sits. In the logbook the night training looks like the circuits in May — only eight months later and in the dark.

18 February, 16:52, three landings with an instructor in 13 minutes. The last flight of the night VFR training with anybody in the right-hand seat.

What follows on this Wednesday evening is unique in the whole logbook — and the real reason the last four weeks have looked the way they did.

The recorded track covers the entire evening; all six entries lie on the same recording.

17:10 to 17:21, one landing, alone, in the dark.

The first solo flight at night. Eight months after the first solo in June, and in some respects the bigger step: this time not only is the right-hand seat empty, everything outside the cockpit is black as well.

Five minutes in the air, one circuit, 1,702 ft. Four more follow that evening — each one entered separately in the logbook.

17:21 to 17:30. One landing, five minutes in the air, alone at night.

Eleven minutes of block time for one circuit means: touch down, roll off, turn around, take off again. No shutdown, no break. In the dark that rhythm is considerably more demanding than by day.

17:30 to 17:40. Halfway — the third of five solo circuits at night.

At this pace something shifts: you no longer think about the landing, you do it. That is exactly why you repeat it five times in a row.

17:40 to 17:50, six minutes in the air. On an 18 February the sun has been gone for over an hour by this time.

Above Bad Vöslau there is nothing now but the airfield lighting, behind it the lights of Baden and Wiener Neustadt, and in the west nothing but black mountains.

17:50 to 18:01. Last landing of the evening, alone, in the dark.

The balance of this Wednesday evening: eight landings in 69 minutes of block time, five of them solo at night. An evening on which nothing happened except the most important thing.

That completes the night VFR training: begun on 26 January, finished on 18 February, six flying evenings, 23 landings in the dark altogether.