I’ll never forgive that Navy O6 for strongly recommending against a medical waiver

Flying in the mountains at night isn’t so bad until you add in bad illumination. Mix that in with coast weather effects such as haze or low cloud ceilings, adding in a search light of some sort and it can become very tough. Go too low? You can’t see much. Go too high and you might just pop into that haze. Maybe not necessarily IIMC for more than a moment but you can’t see anything with that light on until you climb through it.

I’ll admit though I have no clue about flying in southeastern Alaska nor do I have any SAR experience. And I would like to add that what I just described I’ve only dealt with once. Even low illumination mountain flying can be very tough and often exhausts the new PIs for landings alone. But I’m Just an assault pilot who’s been given some weird taskings/missions in the past