"You ready for this?" the earphones inside my helmet crackled. It was a cold, moonless night over Texas and I was at 1,200 feet in a jet-black Bell 407 helicopter with Scott Baxter, an instructor with the Fort Worth-based Bell Helicopter Training Academy. From the left seat Baxter was teaching me the finer points of flying with night vision goggles, and it was time to demonstrate their usefulness during one of the more hair-raising events one can experience in a helicopter: au-torotation after a simulated engine failure. Well, was I ready? I had come to Bell's training facility to sample the thrills and chills of flying with night vision goggles. Bell's school is one of only two approved to teach civilian pilots like me how to fly with NVGs. I also wanted to learn why, over the past three decades, pilots have both praised and cursed the devices. But I didn't come to drop like a rock into the Texas scrub. Fortunately, Baxter had 1,500 hours of NVG time, much of it in situations much more demanding than this, so I nodded: Ready. Simulating engine failure, Baxter chopped the power and the bottom fell out.
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