Examiner comes in, we do paperwork. Oral is like all of my orals have been. Excellent scenarios, and excellent conversation. Only thing I had to look up was I remembered all the limitations of a Commerical pilot but forgot that sightseeing flights now require an LOA. Found that quickly and read it. DPE seemed pleased.
I can kinda tell we are done with the oral because he said we would throughly brief the flight. And he's says we are on to that now. I grab a notepad and we discuss everything. Examiner is very concerned about safety and we discuss exactly how I've been trained to handle the engine outage and restart. We talk about these particular engines not liking to restart and that it's helpful to establish a 120 knot glide on this airplane. (He doesn't give a lot of rides in this specific aircraft. The local DPEs are slammed and he came in from out of town for this. Commutes in a Commanche,
@EdFred !)
Go over all the ground rules for aircraft control and the flight. You're flying. I'm not a pilot. Discuss that if the restart is going poorly you run out of hands to fly and fiddle with the aircraft. He agrees that the other local DPEs are correct in assisting with aircraft control for safety if needed at this point, even though they aren't supposed to fly and if I'm stuck to ask him to play wing leveler and speed maintainer. Safety first. Otherwise we have to declare and land it. These engines don't like to restart at our altitude on high DA days and the DA was VERY high this afternoon. Accelerate/Stop was pushing the underside of 4000' so hard we might as well have called it that.
We talk about where we will generally be and that he wants the practice area frequency in during the maneuvers even though we are just outside of it. (East of Kelly Airpark) We talk about watching for gliders and heavy traffic in that area. Because the wind is forecast to come up, he says we will do the pattern work first. Normal takeoff and landing, short field takeoff and landing, then we'll depart the Delta and navigate via my flight plan (which was huge... APA to PUB to ABQ to TEX!) Oh yeah, we discussed that we didn't have enough fuel on board for that. (Grin!) Talked about whether we could add fuel in ABQ. Yes. Can we add a passenger or two? Maybe. Run calculations. "We can add one small passenger but it really hurts our performance for flying into TEX." Correct. Good.
"Let's take a ten minute break." I'm happy but still freaking mildly. Okay have to get it together for the flying. Breathe. You're not going to do that stupidity of the dive and drive on the ride. It's all good.
We go to the airplane. I do a thorough pre-flight explaining as I go. Usual questions. All good. We talk about since you're "not a pilot" here's how you board the aircraft and I'll help you with the door (unless you don't want to simulate that and we can have "taxi air conditioning", up to you, it's freaking hot out here...)
Climb in and take another deep breath. Everything with the checklist. Taxi out to the north run up area. Run up completed. Talk to ground, talk to tower, fuel pumps and door and my window to go on the checklist.
Do all the pattern work. All goes pretty good. Overshot the base to final turn on the first one by just a bit and thought "oh crap, there it is" but continued. Fixed it. He hasn't said stop so we keep going. Full stop taxi backs at this DA. It's hotter now. Short field stuff goes fine. Okay now to head out of here. Fly out to HOHUM per the plan. Then toward Kelly. We find ourselves under a massive string of virga and I'm getting downdrafts that have me at max power and 80 knots trying to hold altitude and then of course the other side. Thankfully they're going to be west of us for most of this.
Air work goes well. Somehow managed to avoid the virga and made the nicest steep turns ever. Stalls, slow flight (he wanted five knots faster than I trained that, fine by me!), Vmc demo (we barely got to the tiniest first buffet and he says to recover it, that's good - very concerned about aircraft performance today and safety, I was willing to go a little slower). Whew! So far so good. Engine out time, let's get higher. 11,500 to start. Engine fails, mixture full rich, props, throttles full (we're way above where we'll overboost DA wise), identify, verify, left engine is dead, feathering left prop, confirmed, feather it. Right engine is hammering away trying hard. Only making about 32"-33" wow it's hot out. Prop stops. Still on heading, and slowing. Okay restart it.
Okay setup a 120 knot descent to assist getting it to windmill. We are now trading altitude for our restart. Pretty common up here. Eye opening. Mixture full, pump on, crack the throttle and crank. And crank. And crank. 1000'. And crank. It wants to fire and then die. There's a sweet spot where it'll start at this DA and it's somewhere between 1/8" and 1/4" open. Jiggle it. Starts to catch. Slows again. Ahhhhhhh crap! One more. DPE says let me jiggle. Ok. I'll hold the starter. 1500' lost. Engine catches and runs. Pull the prop back a bit so it doesn't over speed and level. 2000'. Okay warm it back up. 15" and we can pull the right one back a bit and hold altitude a little slower than blue line here while it warms up. Phew. Man we need a lot of power to climb today.
Just about had to declare it and land. And it's happened before up here. Just land safely and restart it on the ground.
Engine warms. He says okay let's head for Front Range. Plan ILS 35. I know the engine out approach is coming. At this point my heart rate is insane and I fall back into a bad habit. I get "pitchy" and I'm overcontrolling. Crap. Settle down man. Get ahead of the airplane. Set up the Garmin. Get ATIS. Call DEN approach. 9500. We'll have to come down to start this.
Remember to punch all the buttons for source (right now because it's a borrowed HSI you have to source both the Garmin and the HSI but the Garmin still feeds GPS data to a second indicator on the HSI so you can switch a little early, you still have GPS primary to the approach on that indicator and can set the CDI up for the ILS. A very very nice feature other than the manual source flip needed on the Sandel).
Coming down. Engine fails somewhere before the final approach fix. Simulate caging it and ask for zero thrust. All good. Right leg is jiggling. Ha. ILS glideslope coming in. Anyway that all goes great and FTG makes us break it off a mile out. We head back to Centennial. He says to expect another engine out landing there. No approach this time but we magically lose an engine again in the pattern. Land. Exit the runway. He says, "Congratulations."
Holy crap! I thought I wouldn't make it! Stop, clean up the airplane, taxi in. Heart rate soaring. Larry meets us at the airplane. DPE says, "Looks like we have a new Commercial pilot!"
Logbook, hole in certificate, new Temporary Certificate. Wooooooo!
That was a couple hours ago and I'm still high as a kite. Fun!!!
