Often I have a chance to fly with someone and despite our best efforts we end up flying into dusk or into full on night time. As the sun goes down and the light diminishes, I casually reach to my iPad and do this.
The reaction I get ranges from “That’s cool!” to “That’s witch magic! How did you do it.” I’ve yet to have another pilot say, “Meh.” My wife, I couldn’t even get a meh out of her, but that’s different.
My fellow pilots are anxious to change their iPads too, but I can never remember all the steps to setup an iPad for night mode. Fortunately I can link the original story here where I learned how to do it. Now I can just direct my friends to this site, which will redirect them to this article where I originally learned this trick. See tip #8 for how to setup night time mode. Then apply tip #4 to put this red only mode on a triple click quick access. But DON’T actually do tip #4 as it’s described. I find invert colors just confuses things and red only mode is all you really need for night time flying.
Also, red only mode does wash out the display of some charts. If that’s an issue for you, it’s quick and easy to triple click back to normal colors, see the thing you are struggling to see, and then triple click back to night time mode. With the screen auto adjusted down to minimal light anyway, it doesn’t seem to hurt much to look quickly at normal colors then switch back.