Mike71
SOH-CM-2025
Just to be clear, students did not do night FCLPs (day only carrier quals, normally at an outlying practice field or "OLF" so as not to clobber the intense normal training flights at home base). At Beeville it was OLF Goliad, 16 nm NW of Chase. You can see the two runways on Google Earth, south of the town of Goliad. For the squadrons at NAS Kingsville, they used OLF Alice Orange Grove.----- I would interpret this as "no lights" just VFR training for the student pilots. -----![]()
However, night flying was integral to basic and advanced training, so night ops on the runways at Chase, Kingsville, Meridian, etc were normal.
Night training included night familiarization, night basic/advanced instruments ---- and night formation 2 and 4 plane (sweaty palms for us instructors!).
As an additional note - Chase, Kingsville, Meridian - did not have an ILS or VOR. Most NAS's didn't because they used UHF TACAN, UHF NDBs, and GCA for precision IFR approaches. Reserve NAS's were often co-located at civil airfields and used that field's ILS. These were often home to VR squadrons and their C-47 / C-54 / C-118 / C-9s did have ILS receivers. NAS Dallas, NAS Minneapolis, etc. as examples.
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