Hobobiker
Line Up and Wait
Checkride Write-up
As a student pilot, I looked for as many of these as I could find to give me an indication of what people were going through on their checkrides. I’d heard all the stories ranging from brutally grotesque to piece-of-cake. So, after living through mine to tell the story I’ll try to put it in words. I don’t have the gift of writing like some, but hopefully it will serve as an addition to the library of checkride documentation for other students to read.
Weeks (and even months) before - Studying:
Having missed one on the written exam and knowing that my Type A personality kicks in at times, I’ll admit, I wanted to do very well on the oral exam and studied quite a bit. My study materials, at first, were the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge (PHAK), the Airplane Flying Handbook, YouTube videos, and info here on this forum. Later, I began reading the FAR/AIM and PTS Standards for understanding rather than just skimming. I added an iPad app from Dauntless to my study materials list called “Ride Ready”, which proved to be a very detailed self-test tool and really helped my understanding of some topics. Finally, since I drive 1000 miles every other weekend to go see my kids in the state of Indiana, I added a 2-CD Oral Examination prep kit from ASA. Probably covers the same material as their book, but it was helpful for me to throw in the CD and listen to them while driving.
Kicked outta the nest…the call to the DPE:
I had all my “requirements” met at 32 hours but really needed to work on my flying skills, so I soloed quite a bit for a while. So much, that it had been over 70 days since my CFI and I had flown together so we got together to do our 3 hours of instruction within the 60 days of the checkride. In retrospect, I wouldn’t let that timeframe get so large again. While I HAD improved on my stalls and steep turns, other things (little things) had started to slip. For instance, I was getting sloppy at hitting 65kts on takeoff and then transitioning to 75kts. I was getting too slow on some of my short/soft landings and plopping down on the runway, etc. If I had rode with him more often I would probably have not developed bad habits that he had to “break” before the checkride.
Then my CFI said he was kicking me out of the nest. The DPE and I played phone tag for a while, but finally reached each other. He says, “sure, we can schedule a flight exam, how about Sunday at noon? Call my on Saturday night and we’ll discuss your cross country planning.” Yikes! Short notice, but I was excited and scared all at once. I did one final practice flight on Friday night and that was it…
The day/night before the checkride:
I woke up Saturday morning and began getting all my stuff together. Went through the PTS checklist (it really does help), went to the airport and made multiple copies of many of the performance charts I would need for my XC planning (Takeoff roll, Climb Performance, Landing Roll, etc.), made multiple copies of the flight plan paperwork I use on my kneeboard, and ensured that the maintenance logbook was still where I put it last and still had all the tabs on the correct pages. In a nutshell, I did all the pre-work I could think of before I knew my flight plan destination.
My GF and I had already made plans for dinner and the Comedy Club in Pittsburgh on Saturday night, which we didn’t change. This meant that I had wrapped everything up that I could do without my flight destination by midafternoon on Saturday, including a little last-minute study time. The DPE wanted me to call Saturday night for the XC information, but he didn’t want any calls after 8:00pm. This gave me a little heartburn since I would be sitting in a comedy club around that time, so I called him at 4:00 when we left for Pitt. No answer. I called him again at 5:00 as we were entering the restaurant. No answer. I called him at 7:00 right before the early comedy show, he picked up. Whew! Gave me his weight, gave me the destination, and told me to plan it from airport-to-airport in a straight line without circumventing any airspace. That was a new one on me, but I knew he would be asking what I needed to do to get clearance into any controlled areas rather than doglegging around them.
After the comedy show, we drove home from Pitt and were back around 10:00pm. Admittedly, I started my flight planning that night and did everything I could without knowing what the winds would be. Went to bed, woke up the next morning, and started putting the finishing touches on the planning about four hours before the scheduled checkride.
Sunday – Checkride Day
7:00am. Woke up. Had coffee, but forgot breakfast since I wanted to dive in to the weather and finishing the flight plan. I would feel the effects of that later. Ceilings were low and rain was possible, so I crossed my fingers and went to work on the planning. I tabbed all the relevant pages in my logbook (XC, Night, Instrument), and also created a tabbed binder for all my paperwork (Written Test, Weather, Weight and Balance, 8710 copy, Summary of flight experience hours, etc).
10:00am. Arrived at the flight school to finalize some printouts and study a little more. Plane was gone. Ummmm….pulse goes up a bit so I check the flight schedule and someone has the plane from 8am until 10am. Whew… No worries. Then another CFI walks in and tells me that he will be going up in the plane at 10am, but that he will be on the ground around 11am so I can fuel it up and leave. Okay by me. My flight was only about 30 minutes to the airport where I was meeting the DPE for the checkride, but I wanted some time to do a quick landing or two in the pattern to warm up. To add to the fun, there was a fly-in at our home airport that morning and they were parking planes on the tarmac. Luckily the crew at the airport knew I had a checkride so they didn’t park anyone in front of our hangar and they had the fuel truck ready for me when the other CFI landed around 11am.
11:00am. Everything looks “legally” okay on the weather. Ceilings are high enough that I could recover my maneuvers within 1500 AGL. Lots of low clouds though, and everyone is wondering if weather will be moving in. I’ve been a “fair weather flyer” up to this point and I’ve never pressed the issue of wind or ceilings. I really didn’t want to reschedule the checkride, but more importantly I wanted to be safe. So…I had already planned with my GF that if I flew down to the test site and weather moved in she would drive down and pick me up. I could go back the next day to get the plane if I needed.
11:30am – Plane is preflighted and fueled. I call the DPE to let him know I’m taking off. No answer. No problem. I leave him a message and get on my way. Started my flight climbing for 3500 and just as I made it there it was evident that I would be getting lower. Scattered clouds seemed to be everywhere around me and 3000 worked much better. I “might” have even flew through one of those “see thru” clouds that everyone debates is even a real cloud, but never have I ever done anything like that until today. The flight to the DPE airport is the bumpiest, cloudiest flight I have ever made – but all very legal in terms of visibility and ceilings. My limited 59 hours of flight had just never included anything like this, especially solo, since I didn’t normally fly on days like this.
12:00. I land at the airport and my DPE comes out to greet me in a golf cart. It’s a small, rural airport, with small planes of all different airworthiness conditions lining the taxiways and dirt parking lots. DPE is concerned about weather moving in and me not being able to get back home, and also about the ceiling heights for the maneuvers. I tell him about my prior arrangements with the GF, which puts him at ease a bit. I ask him if we could go through the oral and then check the weather again to see if it was okay to fly, to which he agrees. We go inside to his office and he checks all my paperwork. He complimented the binder I had put together to make everything easy to find for him, which seemed to get us off to a good start. Truthfully, he spent very little time with it because he saw what he needed and it was time to move on.
The Oral Exam:
Was I nervous as we began? Yep. Did I think I had prepared to the best of my ability? Absolutely. He began with questions about what I could do as a pilot, what I needed to do to maintain the currency of the certificate for day flight, for night flight with passengers, etc. He asked about the plane, the engine, the carburetor, icing, etc. He went into questions about fore and aft loading for weight and balance, and we talked about gauges that used the engine-driven vacuum pump. He went into the pitot static discussion and the instruments that used ram air pressure from the pitot tube vs. static pressure from the ports. I was prepared for the oral exam, but the one thing that made me sweat was our discussion about the airspeeds of the plane (of all things!). While I had memorized certain V-speeds that weren’t on the gauge (Vx, Vy, Va), I had not taken the time to memorize ALL the speeds that were evident on the gauge such as the top of the white arc, top of the green arc. I knew the bottom of the white are was the dirty stall speed (49kts) and I remembered the top of the white arc for Vfe (103kts), but I didn’t have the green arc speeds memorized. I knew the Vne as well, and thought through the top of the green arc but it took me a few seconds. In the end I really did know most all of the speeds and he was satisfied, but I was wishing that I had spent more time memorizing those speeds that I really didn’t use that much in my normal flying. Questions continued about stalls and some other aspects of flight, but in the end I’m probably very fortunate compared to some oral exams I’ve read about. Maybe it was because I was prepared, maybe it was because of the incoming weather, but for whatever reason the oral part of my exam was very short.
The Flight portion of the exam:
The weather actually seemed to improve during the oral exam, and we went out for the flying portion. I’ll admit I was very confident that I knew the materials for the oral exam. The flight portion, however, not so much. While I had improved my steep turns and stalls, the diversion had me worried. We took off (regular takeoff), and I did a straight out departure while gaining altitude up to my flight plan. I turned around, overflew the airport at the right speed an altitude and hit my timer. Seven minutes into my flight I had located my first visual checkpoint, maintained my heading, and maintained my altitude. So far so good. We then hit the notorious “storm ahead, let’s divert to…” statement. There’s a nice, long airstrip that he tends to divert students to in the area and I was prepared to do so. Nope. He throws me a curveball and says “let’s divert over to this little Farm Show runway. Yikes! Is that little line even an airport on the sectional?!? Okay, I start my turn, give him an approximate heading, speed, and ETA. I don’t even find the little thing until I’m almost on top of it. No ATIS or anything on the sectional to dial in so we overfly the airport, take a look at the winds, then begin my pattern on the upwind. To me, it looked like I was going to hook some power lines over the local road while on short final to this little narrow runway. I’m sure that’s exactly why he used it, in order to give the illusion example of small, narrow runways. I’m low, then I’m high, the winds are bouncing me around on short final, I plop it down on the runway in a not-so-soft fashion, and then begin to ride the brakes and make the plane sway back and forth. His voice gets much more stern and loud and says “get your feet off the brakes!” I thought that was it for me, but he proceeded to go back to his normal voice and tell me to just let it roll for a bit. Maybe I’ve been practicing too many short-field landings, but it was a lesson learned. He had me back taxi and do it again, which was much better but I still plopped it down instead of a nice, stall-horn, greaser.
We headed back up, he gave me an altitude, and we began some slow flight maneuvers after a clearing turn. I asked if he wanted to hear the horn during the entire exercise, and he asked me how slow I’ve been normally doing slow flight. I tell him 55-60, and he says that would be fine. Turns to the right, turns to the left. Then we did stalls. He wanted to feel much more of the buffeting during the power-on stall than my CFI, which was no big deal to me, but I recovered from my first stall a little early because of this so we did a second. Under the foggles he put me into a diving turn. I’m VERY thankful that my CFI had just reminded me to pull power on a dive before leveling the ailerons and slowly pulling back up. In practice I was forgetting to pull power. He also asked that I do a straight climb while under the foggles. Should be easy, right? Well, it would have been had I remembered to add power. Finally he asked me whether I always climbed without adding power. I got the hint, added power, and hit the altitude he wanted. Hey, at least I never lost my heading. All other things went fairly well with the exception of the VOR. He asked me to fly him to a VOR. EASY! Dialed it in, identified the morse code, turned it to the ‘To’ heading until the needle was centered, and then flew to the needle. Constantly. Not sure what the heck happened, but I felt like I was chasing the needle in a left turn for an entire circle of the plane. Maybe my mind went blank, because I’ve never had issues with flying to a VOR in the past. I was hot, sweating, tired, and very unsure of how this flight test was going to end.
We headed to yet another airport, did some more landings (none of which were great), and then we headed back to the airport from which we started. As I was entering the 45 for the downwind he commented “if you don’t turn soon, you’re going to fly right over the airport.” Ugh, I was trying to make my normal pattern entry turn which puts the runway about halfway or three quarters of the way down my wing but I’m sure I let it get in too close. He obviously preferred a bit further out. He asked me to fly some tight patterns around the airport, and I knew I had rounded some of the corners of my previous ones – especially base-to-final. I tightened up my patterns, and he asked me for a normal landing. I plopped another one down. Not bad, but not anywhere close to what I know I can do. We back taxi and he asked me for another normal landing, but this time a nice, smooth one with the stall horn blaring. I come around on short final, trimmed up fairly nice, feeling confident I’m finally gonna nail this one good…and I float it just before touching down. !@$$%#@!@!!!! I add some power pull the yoke back to my gut, get the stall horn to go just before touchdown, but it isn’t a nice greaser. Somewhat smooth, but not great. Oh well.
We back taxi to the taxiway, park the plane, and I pull the checklist out for shutdown. Unfortunately, I’ve started a bad habit of just shutting things off in a “flow” from right to left instead of going step-by-step on the checklist. Lesson learned, and on my CHECKRIDE of all times. He asked me if we’re ready to depart the plane and go into the office. I’m hot, tired, frustrated, and had no idea if I had passed or not at this point (and I was thinking that had I been the examiner I would have probably failed me). I say, “yep, I think so.” He replies “really?” I go through the checklist item by item and notice that I’ve left the key turned on, keeping both mags hot. UUUUGGGGHHHH!
I ask if I need to bring anything with me into the office, and says he only needs my logbook. I’m pretty quiet as I walk beside him up to the office. He opens the office door and lets me go ahead of him, and states that I’m a private pilot now and it will take him a few minutes to do the paperwork. His comment actually surprised me, because I was sure there were a few things he could have failed me on if he wanted to. I thanked him, and told him that I knew I had made some mistakes during the flight test but was wondering if they were bad enough for me to fail. He said that mistakes are always made, but that I had proved I could be a safe pilot, make adjustments, and that nothing was bad enough to warrant a failure. He DID remind me, however, to go through each item of a checklist every time. Lesson learned.
He was a great DPE. Firm at times? Absolutely. Did I deserve his scrutiny when I made him raise his voice? Absolutely! I look forward to flying with him again when I decide to do my instrument rating.
Thanks for reading this far everyone. Sorry for the e-book, but I was trying to capture a lot of the details for the other students reading through these checkride threads.
As a student pilot, I looked for as many of these as I could find to give me an indication of what people were going through on their checkrides. I’d heard all the stories ranging from brutally grotesque to piece-of-cake. So, after living through mine to tell the story I’ll try to put it in words. I don’t have the gift of writing like some, but hopefully it will serve as an addition to the library of checkride documentation for other students to read.
Weeks (and even months) before - Studying:
Having missed one on the written exam and knowing that my Type A personality kicks in at times, I’ll admit, I wanted to do very well on the oral exam and studied quite a bit. My study materials, at first, were the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge (PHAK), the Airplane Flying Handbook, YouTube videos, and info here on this forum. Later, I began reading the FAR/AIM and PTS Standards for understanding rather than just skimming. I added an iPad app from Dauntless to my study materials list called “Ride Ready”, which proved to be a very detailed self-test tool and really helped my understanding of some topics. Finally, since I drive 1000 miles every other weekend to go see my kids in the state of Indiana, I added a 2-CD Oral Examination prep kit from ASA. Probably covers the same material as their book, but it was helpful for me to throw in the CD and listen to them while driving.
Kicked outta the nest…the call to the DPE:
I had all my “requirements” met at 32 hours but really needed to work on my flying skills, so I soloed quite a bit for a while. So much, that it had been over 70 days since my CFI and I had flown together so we got together to do our 3 hours of instruction within the 60 days of the checkride. In retrospect, I wouldn’t let that timeframe get so large again. While I HAD improved on my stalls and steep turns, other things (little things) had started to slip. For instance, I was getting sloppy at hitting 65kts on takeoff and then transitioning to 75kts. I was getting too slow on some of my short/soft landings and plopping down on the runway, etc. If I had rode with him more often I would probably have not developed bad habits that he had to “break” before the checkride.
Then my CFI said he was kicking me out of the nest. The DPE and I played phone tag for a while, but finally reached each other. He says, “sure, we can schedule a flight exam, how about Sunday at noon? Call my on Saturday night and we’ll discuss your cross country planning.” Yikes! Short notice, but I was excited and scared all at once. I did one final practice flight on Friday night and that was it…
The day/night before the checkride:
I woke up Saturday morning and began getting all my stuff together. Went through the PTS checklist (it really does help), went to the airport and made multiple copies of many of the performance charts I would need for my XC planning (Takeoff roll, Climb Performance, Landing Roll, etc.), made multiple copies of the flight plan paperwork I use on my kneeboard, and ensured that the maintenance logbook was still where I put it last and still had all the tabs on the correct pages. In a nutshell, I did all the pre-work I could think of before I knew my flight plan destination.
My GF and I had already made plans for dinner and the Comedy Club in Pittsburgh on Saturday night, which we didn’t change. This meant that I had wrapped everything up that I could do without my flight destination by midafternoon on Saturday, including a little last-minute study time. The DPE wanted me to call Saturday night for the XC information, but he didn’t want any calls after 8:00pm. This gave me a little heartburn since I would be sitting in a comedy club around that time, so I called him at 4:00 when we left for Pitt. No answer. I called him again at 5:00 as we were entering the restaurant. No answer. I called him at 7:00 right before the early comedy show, he picked up. Whew! Gave me his weight, gave me the destination, and told me to plan it from airport-to-airport in a straight line without circumventing any airspace. That was a new one on me, but I knew he would be asking what I needed to do to get clearance into any controlled areas rather than doglegging around them.
After the comedy show, we drove home from Pitt and were back around 10:00pm. Admittedly, I started my flight planning that night and did everything I could without knowing what the winds would be. Went to bed, woke up the next morning, and started putting the finishing touches on the planning about four hours before the scheduled checkride.
Sunday – Checkride Day
7:00am. Woke up. Had coffee, but forgot breakfast since I wanted to dive in to the weather and finishing the flight plan. I would feel the effects of that later. Ceilings were low and rain was possible, so I crossed my fingers and went to work on the planning. I tabbed all the relevant pages in my logbook (XC, Night, Instrument), and also created a tabbed binder for all my paperwork (Written Test, Weather, Weight and Balance, 8710 copy, Summary of flight experience hours, etc).
10:00am. Arrived at the flight school to finalize some printouts and study a little more. Plane was gone. Ummmm….pulse goes up a bit so I check the flight schedule and someone has the plane from 8am until 10am. Whew… No worries. Then another CFI walks in and tells me that he will be going up in the plane at 10am, but that he will be on the ground around 11am so I can fuel it up and leave. Okay by me. My flight was only about 30 minutes to the airport where I was meeting the DPE for the checkride, but I wanted some time to do a quick landing or two in the pattern to warm up. To add to the fun, there was a fly-in at our home airport that morning and they were parking planes on the tarmac. Luckily the crew at the airport knew I had a checkride so they didn’t park anyone in front of our hangar and they had the fuel truck ready for me when the other CFI landed around 11am.
11:00am. Everything looks “legally” okay on the weather. Ceilings are high enough that I could recover my maneuvers within 1500 AGL. Lots of low clouds though, and everyone is wondering if weather will be moving in. I’ve been a “fair weather flyer” up to this point and I’ve never pressed the issue of wind or ceilings. I really didn’t want to reschedule the checkride, but more importantly I wanted to be safe. So…I had already planned with my GF that if I flew down to the test site and weather moved in she would drive down and pick me up. I could go back the next day to get the plane if I needed.
11:30am – Plane is preflighted and fueled. I call the DPE to let him know I’m taking off. No answer. No problem. I leave him a message and get on my way. Started my flight climbing for 3500 and just as I made it there it was evident that I would be getting lower. Scattered clouds seemed to be everywhere around me and 3000 worked much better. I “might” have even flew through one of those “see thru” clouds that everyone debates is even a real cloud, but never have I ever done anything like that until today. The flight to the DPE airport is the bumpiest, cloudiest flight I have ever made – but all very legal in terms of visibility and ceilings. My limited 59 hours of flight had just never included anything like this, especially solo, since I didn’t normally fly on days like this.
12:00. I land at the airport and my DPE comes out to greet me in a golf cart. It’s a small, rural airport, with small planes of all different airworthiness conditions lining the taxiways and dirt parking lots. DPE is concerned about weather moving in and me not being able to get back home, and also about the ceiling heights for the maneuvers. I tell him about my prior arrangements with the GF, which puts him at ease a bit. I ask him if we could go through the oral and then check the weather again to see if it was okay to fly, to which he agrees. We go inside to his office and he checks all my paperwork. He complimented the binder I had put together to make everything easy to find for him, which seemed to get us off to a good start. Truthfully, he spent very little time with it because he saw what he needed and it was time to move on.
The Oral Exam:
Was I nervous as we began? Yep. Did I think I had prepared to the best of my ability? Absolutely. He began with questions about what I could do as a pilot, what I needed to do to maintain the currency of the certificate for day flight, for night flight with passengers, etc. He asked about the plane, the engine, the carburetor, icing, etc. He went into questions about fore and aft loading for weight and balance, and we talked about gauges that used the engine-driven vacuum pump. He went into the pitot static discussion and the instruments that used ram air pressure from the pitot tube vs. static pressure from the ports. I was prepared for the oral exam, but the one thing that made me sweat was our discussion about the airspeeds of the plane (of all things!). While I had memorized certain V-speeds that weren’t on the gauge (Vx, Vy, Va), I had not taken the time to memorize ALL the speeds that were evident on the gauge such as the top of the white arc, top of the green arc. I knew the bottom of the white are was the dirty stall speed (49kts) and I remembered the top of the white arc for Vfe (103kts), but I didn’t have the green arc speeds memorized. I knew the Vne as well, and thought through the top of the green arc but it took me a few seconds. In the end I really did know most all of the speeds and he was satisfied, but I was wishing that I had spent more time memorizing those speeds that I really didn’t use that much in my normal flying. Questions continued about stalls and some other aspects of flight, but in the end I’m probably very fortunate compared to some oral exams I’ve read about. Maybe it was because I was prepared, maybe it was because of the incoming weather, but for whatever reason the oral part of my exam was very short.
The Flight portion of the exam:
The weather actually seemed to improve during the oral exam, and we went out for the flying portion. I’ll admit I was very confident that I knew the materials for the oral exam. The flight portion, however, not so much. While I had improved my steep turns and stalls, the diversion had me worried. We took off (regular takeoff), and I did a straight out departure while gaining altitude up to my flight plan. I turned around, overflew the airport at the right speed an altitude and hit my timer. Seven minutes into my flight I had located my first visual checkpoint, maintained my heading, and maintained my altitude. So far so good. We then hit the notorious “storm ahead, let’s divert to…” statement. There’s a nice, long airstrip that he tends to divert students to in the area and I was prepared to do so. Nope. He throws me a curveball and says “let’s divert over to this little Farm Show runway. Yikes! Is that little line even an airport on the sectional?!? Okay, I start my turn, give him an approximate heading, speed, and ETA. I don’t even find the little thing until I’m almost on top of it. No ATIS or anything on the sectional to dial in so we overfly the airport, take a look at the winds, then begin my pattern on the upwind. To me, it looked like I was going to hook some power lines over the local road while on short final to this little narrow runway. I’m sure that’s exactly why he used it, in order to give the illusion example of small, narrow runways. I’m low, then I’m high, the winds are bouncing me around on short final, I plop it down on the runway in a not-so-soft fashion, and then begin to ride the brakes and make the plane sway back and forth. His voice gets much more stern and loud and says “get your feet off the brakes!” I thought that was it for me, but he proceeded to go back to his normal voice and tell me to just let it roll for a bit. Maybe I’ve been practicing too many short-field landings, but it was a lesson learned. He had me back taxi and do it again, which was much better but I still plopped it down instead of a nice, stall-horn, greaser.
We headed back up, he gave me an altitude, and we began some slow flight maneuvers after a clearing turn. I asked if he wanted to hear the horn during the entire exercise, and he asked me how slow I’ve been normally doing slow flight. I tell him 55-60, and he says that would be fine. Turns to the right, turns to the left. Then we did stalls. He wanted to feel much more of the buffeting during the power-on stall than my CFI, which was no big deal to me, but I recovered from my first stall a little early because of this so we did a second. Under the foggles he put me into a diving turn. I’m VERY thankful that my CFI had just reminded me to pull power on a dive before leveling the ailerons and slowly pulling back up. In practice I was forgetting to pull power. He also asked that I do a straight climb while under the foggles. Should be easy, right? Well, it would have been had I remembered to add power. Finally he asked me whether I always climbed without adding power. I got the hint, added power, and hit the altitude he wanted. Hey, at least I never lost my heading. All other things went fairly well with the exception of the VOR. He asked me to fly him to a VOR. EASY! Dialed it in, identified the morse code, turned it to the ‘To’ heading until the needle was centered, and then flew to the needle. Constantly. Not sure what the heck happened, but I felt like I was chasing the needle in a left turn for an entire circle of the plane. Maybe my mind went blank, because I’ve never had issues with flying to a VOR in the past. I was hot, sweating, tired, and very unsure of how this flight test was going to end.
We headed to yet another airport, did some more landings (none of which were great), and then we headed back to the airport from which we started. As I was entering the 45 for the downwind he commented “if you don’t turn soon, you’re going to fly right over the airport.” Ugh, I was trying to make my normal pattern entry turn which puts the runway about halfway or three quarters of the way down my wing but I’m sure I let it get in too close. He obviously preferred a bit further out. He asked me to fly some tight patterns around the airport, and I knew I had rounded some of the corners of my previous ones – especially base-to-final. I tightened up my patterns, and he asked me for a normal landing. I plopped another one down. Not bad, but not anywhere close to what I know I can do. We back taxi and he asked me for another normal landing, but this time a nice, smooth one with the stall horn blaring. I come around on short final, trimmed up fairly nice, feeling confident I’m finally gonna nail this one good…and I float it just before touching down. !@$$%#@!@!!!! I add some power pull the yoke back to my gut, get the stall horn to go just before touchdown, but it isn’t a nice greaser. Somewhat smooth, but not great. Oh well.
We back taxi to the taxiway, park the plane, and I pull the checklist out for shutdown. Unfortunately, I’ve started a bad habit of just shutting things off in a “flow” from right to left instead of going step-by-step on the checklist. Lesson learned, and on my CHECKRIDE of all times. He asked me if we’re ready to depart the plane and go into the office. I’m hot, tired, frustrated, and had no idea if I had passed or not at this point (and I was thinking that had I been the examiner I would have probably failed me). I say, “yep, I think so.” He replies “really?” I go through the checklist item by item and notice that I’ve left the key turned on, keeping both mags hot. UUUUGGGGHHHH!
I ask if I need to bring anything with me into the office, and says he only needs my logbook. I’m pretty quiet as I walk beside him up to the office. He opens the office door and lets me go ahead of him, and states that I’m a private pilot now and it will take him a few minutes to do the paperwork. His comment actually surprised me, because I was sure there were a few things he could have failed me on if he wanted to. I thanked him, and told him that I knew I had made some mistakes during the flight test but was wondering if they were bad enough for me to fail. He said that mistakes are always made, but that I had proved I could be a safe pilot, make adjustments, and that nothing was bad enough to warrant a failure. He DID remind me, however, to go through each item of a checklist every time. Lesson learned.
He was a great DPE. Firm at times? Absolutely. Did I deserve his scrutiny when I made him raise his voice? Absolutely! I look forward to flying with him again when I decide to do my instrument rating.
Thanks for reading this far everyone. Sorry for the e-book, but I was trying to capture a lot of the details for the other students reading through these checkride threads.
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