HPNPilot1200
En-Route
Weight & Balance complete, flight planning underway (4B8 - ACK), aircraft and pilot logbooks, and terminal and enroute charts in hand. Instrument checkride on Friday.
Man alive, Jason- that was some kinda ride!
JOOC, did you have any gouge on what the ride would be like, what the DPE'd ask for you to do?
The oral was a piece of cake and my CFII actually sat in on it, but didn't say anything. The DPE said it wasn't worth wasting more of both our time since he believed I knew all the answers.
Passed. Oral was a quick 45 minutes, but it was quite a ride. Started out on a mock IFR to KACK, followed by a partial panel DME arc to the partial panel full VOR-A at IJD, a few turns in the hold over ORW, then the partial panel GPS 02 into HFD, and then radar vectors for the ILS 33 at BDL, partial panel including a failed airspeed indicator. This is all while having no GPS except for the GPS approach. After that we went missed, did an unusual attitude, timed turns, landed back at Robertson (4B8) and I had a new temporary in my pocket. Lots of fun.
Best,
Jason
Out of my four check rides, I've found the main thing the DE is looking for is that you know what you're talking about. If you do, that usually doesn't take long. After that, it then becomes a matter of teaching new things, and how long they want to spend on that. For example, the DE for my CP-AMEL-IA ride and I had a good discussion regarding responsibilities of aircraft ownership (since I own the Aztec I was flying), and he taught me a lot during it. It wasn't on the requirements, but I learned a lot and appreciated it. We also talked a lot about Aztecs in general, as the DE had some insane number of hours worth of Aztec time, like on the order of 5000+. I figured it was a good opportunity to learn what I could from him.
Two of the four examiners I've used have commented that they can usually tell how a candidate is going to do on the oral in the first 5 minutes. One also said about the same thing about the flying portion although he did add that a few have proven his initial conclusion to be false later in the ride.
I found this to be true too. I also found out that the people who are natural good sticks are not automatically good students because there is no correlation between between having good hand-eye coordination and having good study habits.Another CFI I flew with once said something similar - "When you start teaching, you'll be able to tell pretty quickly the people who are natural 'good sticks' and the people who will need more work."