Mermaid Lights

At night, when ceilings and visibility are down low (say 300' and 3/4 mile), ground lights try to lead you astray! Like the siren songs of mermaids tempting lost sailors onto the rocks, those ground lights you see aren't the REILs! Those ground lights will be your end IF you let yourself lose concentration on the glideslope and localizer needles and instead initiate a turn or early descent. Your eyes badly want to find orientation as you're coming down thru the murky morass, searching for that runway. But instead you need to stay focused on those needles, keep them centered in the donut, and push the throttles and pull that yoke to climb for all your ship's got if things suddenly aren't looking right - you can think about it later. One of the awesome parts of flying cargo is that the boxes don't care when the weather goes down the tubes, and the courier just wants you to appear per schedule. "Oh, yeah, it is a little foggy tonight eh?" The call to dispatch may or may not find sympathy, yeah it's 3am with 100' and 1/4 mile and what are you gonna do boy? "Somebody got in about a half-hour ago", "probably just the ASOS being unreliable", "I've got the boxes so let's launch now, why wait any longer?" Well, I might be waiting to have better than a snowball's chance in hell of actually seeing the runway before touchdown. It is only boxes of paper you know, not the fate of the entire free world or somebody's life on the line (except mine). Practically speaking, don't look up much until your ship is at DA and don't let your attention to those needles relax until you are ON the runway. It isn't too difficult if you've thought it thru ahead of time and are alert, but when you're dog tired, bleary eyed, and ham-fisted sloppy, then diving at those oh so pretty lights might result in it being your last flight of this life! One of two things does eventually happen to every pilot: you're going on your last flight and you know it, or you're going on your last flight and you don't know it (bang!). Talk doesn't cook rice!