Grum.Man
En-Route
Passed my instrument check ride yesterday. Talk about a huge relief and weight off your shoulders. I have trained off an on for a year or two. Between airplane issues and finding instructor time and safety pilot time it took way longer than expected. Perhaps the greatest challenge of the whole rating was just building the hours. I don't like asking for help and trying to find other pilots with the same availability as you is very stressful. I feel like I was over prepared for the questions and flying we did but you can never know too much when it comes time to apply it. My following thoughts may be a little jumbled but it will lay out my experience for others who may fear the check ride.
I was most over prepared for the oral portion. The examiner was very straight forward, no tricky questions, strange scenarios, pretty much asked questions as they were presented in the study material. My advice here is to carefully browse approach plates and enroute charts and look for little symbols that you don't know. If you don't know, find out because those are the ones they will ask about. The ones I initially didn't know that I am glad I learned were the displaced threshold symbol on the airport plan view, declared distances, arresting equipment, and know the details about surveillance radar. I would guess 75% of the questions were going through the plates and charts. The advice of keeping the answers short is a good one and the examiner would actually cut me off once they heard what they were looking for.
I was told to prepare an IFR flight plan to KCVG to include a nav log. I spent a lot of time creating this, studying my route, why I selected my altitude, and kept updating the weather and winds aloft calculations to determine if I needed an alternate. The examiner just glanced at it (im sure they had seen the same route thousands of time) and asked the questions I figured they would about altitude and weather minimums at the destination. At the end the examiner said I did excellent, now on to the flying portion.
I will start off by saying I had a few things working in my favor that I initially thought would be a handicap. I had scheduled the ride in the morning for the smoothest air possible. We kept getting delayed due to a low ceiling. By the time we launched the winds had picked up and there were lots of up drafts and down drafts. I don't know what the examiner's usual procedure is but we couldn't fly most of the full missed approaches due to clouds so we would fly to minimums then I was given radar vectors and altitudes which made things a little easier. My next benefit was that I am still using an old KLN90B gps. There is less information available so it is less distracting to me, but more distracting to an examiner who has not seen one in a long time. Doing the check ride in such a unique airplane really put me in control. After the ride the examiner made comments that they had difficulty keeping up their scan because of the unique layout of the panel and the airplane performance. They did say it was the fastest instrument check ride they had ever given. lol.
We did a VOR/DME approach with vectors to intercept, a partial panel RNAV approach, ILS with a circle to land, and unusual attitude. The airplane has an old Stec 50 autopilot that only does altitude hold and will fly the heading bug or from the CDI but does not have GPS steering. Didn't matter much anyway because most of the ride is from the FAF inbound where they will not let you use autopilot anyway. I had to hand fly the vectors to intercept the ILS which added some additional workload. I was given a pretty early turn due to not realizing how fast we were going. By the time the localizer came in the glide slope was already one dot above and I had to scramble to get configured for landing.
Be sure to follow your checklist, read them out loud, and keep your radio calls going. The only comments from the flight was that they were impressed how well I stayed ahead of the airplane and adjusted to the poor routing for the ILS. That's it..... all the studying, gas money, stress, paper work, is all over and I have a hole in my old license and a new temporary one. It took a while to sink in as I thought that day would never come. Stick with it, be confident, and be prepared. Now on to the next rating!
I was most over prepared for the oral portion. The examiner was very straight forward, no tricky questions, strange scenarios, pretty much asked questions as they were presented in the study material. My advice here is to carefully browse approach plates and enroute charts and look for little symbols that you don't know. If you don't know, find out because those are the ones they will ask about. The ones I initially didn't know that I am glad I learned were the displaced threshold symbol on the airport plan view, declared distances, arresting equipment, and know the details about surveillance radar. I would guess 75% of the questions were going through the plates and charts. The advice of keeping the answers short is a good one and the examiner would actually cut me off once they heard what they were looking for.
I was told to prepare an IFR flight plan to KCVG to include a nav log. I spent a lot of time creating this, studying my route, why I selected my altitude, and kept updating the weather and winds aloft calculations to determine if I needed an alternate. The examiner just glanced at it (im sure they had seen the same route thousands of time) and asked the questions I figured they would about altitude and weather minimums at the destination. At the end the examiner said I did excellent, now on to the flying portion.
I will start off by saying I had a few things working in my favor that I initially thought would be a handicap. I had scheduled the ride in the morning for the smoothest air possible. We kept getting delayed due to a low ceiling. By the time we launched the winds had picked up and there were lots of up drafts and down drafts. I don't know what the examiner's usual procedure is but we couldn't fly most of the full missed approaches due to clouds so we would fly to minimums then I was given radar vectors and altitudes which made things a little easier. My next benefit was that I am still using an old KLN90B gps. There is less information available so it is less distracting to me, but more distracting to an examiner who has not seen one in a long time. Doing the check ride in such a unique airplane really put me in control. After the ride the examiner made comments that they had difficulty keeping up their scan because of the unique layout of the panel and the airplane performance. They did say it was the fastest instrument check ride they had ever given. lol.
We did a VOR/DME approach with vectors to intercept, a partial panel RNAV approach, ILS with a circle to land, and unusual attitude. The airplane has an old Stec 50 autopilot that only does altitude hold and will fly the heading bug or from the CDI but does not have GPS steering. Didn't matter much anyway because most of the ride is from the FAF inbound where they will not let you use autopilot anyway. I had to hand fly the vectors to intercept the ILS which added some additional workload. I was given a pretty early turn due to not realizing how fast we were going. By the time the localizer came in the glide slope was already one dot above and I had to scramble to get configured for landing.
Be sure to follow your checklist, read them out loud, and keep your radio calls going. The only comments from the flight was that they were impressed how well I stayed ahead of the airplane and adjusted to the poor routing for the ILS. That's it..... all the studying, gas money, stress, paper work, is all over and I have a hole in my old license and a new temporary one. It took a while to sink in as I thought that day would never come. Stick with it, be confident, and be prepared. Now on to the next rating!
Now go get it wet...
