June 2008 Archives
After several months of training I was finally ready for the Private Pilot Checkride. I had fulfilled all the requirements (40+ hours, night flight, cross-countries, etc) and my instructor, Richard Klein, agreed that I was ready, so he told me to give Smitty a call over a Classic Aviation down at Addison Airport (ADS) and get it scheduled.
Why Smitty? He is 86 years old and FAA Examiner almost 60 years. He’s probably given over 10,000 checkrides. Everyone I had spoken to who knew of Smitty told me that he is the best. He’s tough but fair and he is flexible. Everything he tells you is designed to teach you something as well as to test your knowledge. If you don’t walk away from your checkride having learned something from him, you have done something wrong. In short, he knows what he’s doing.
The first thing to note is that I was nervous. There was no way around it. I tried to tell myself this is no big deal, that I was ready, and that even if I failed the checkride, I can retake it in a few weeks. So, no worries, right? No luck, I was still nervous. However, when I walked into his office, and we began our conversation over the necessary paperwork I almost did not notice that he had begun our oral exam. He just started telling stories and would, at various points, pause to ask me question. His style set me at ease quite a bit and made recalling the knowledge and answering the questions easier.
At this point, I should note that I did the oral portion of the checkride and my flight portion on different days. That is not normally how you do it, but the weather was marginal VFR on the date of my original exam due to low ceilings and I just was not comfortable flying that day. The take away here is that it is okay to say, “We’re not flying today.” If you feel uncomfortable flying for any reason due to weather, or maybe you aren’t feeling well that day, do not hesitate to either suspend the flying portion or reschedule the checkride all together. You should exercise the same judgment for the checkride that you would in an actual cross-country trip.
For the oral, he asked me to plan a flight to Tulsa, OK and do a weight and balance problem. I called ahead and asked about this prior to the checkride. I charted the flight and filled out a navigation log with checkpoints, weather, and course heading including wind corrected angle. Basically, I treated the flight plan as if I was really going to fly it all the way to Tulsa. For the weight and balance calculation was to solve for 4 of me in the Cessna 172 I used for the checkride. In my case, I could only carry 11 gallons of fuel, which meant; ultimately I would need a bigger plane. So, I did an additional weight and balance for myself and Smitty (estimating that he was 150 lbs).
Additionally, I got to know the plane I was flying. I needed to be able to show him (if he asked) how I knew that the plane legally allowed to fly. I needed to know things like what paperwork is necessary, the fuel capacity, the voltage of the electrical system, the gross weight of the aircraft, and the horsepower of the engine. Knowing your aircraft is an important part of knowing its capabilities and therefore, an important part of the practical exam.
Remember, you are the pilot in command. You have the final say in the operation of the flight. Smitty will probably not ask you about seatbelts, but you should know what the FAR says and if he decides not to put his on, you need to brief him on it and make sure he is in compliance. Remember also, that if you feel that something he asks you to do is unsafe, you have the option of saying “no.” It is your responsibility as pilot in command to ensure the the flight is conducted in a safe manner.
Smitty is flexible but knew to still be on my toes. On my checkride, He asked me to do a soft field takeoff, so I set up the plane and started my takeoff run and when I got off the ground he said, “there’s an obstacle, get us over it.” We essentially did a combination of a soft field and short field takeoff. I was prepared for this eventuality and steepened my climb to get over the obstacle.
When I took off I was flying my flight plan using solely using dead-reckoning and pilotage. In fact, Smitty set the GPS so as to render the display useless during this phase of the flight. He expected me to use my heading gyro, chart, and eyes looking out the window. After I found Aero Country Airport (T31) and he diverted me to McKinney to do the landings.
Smitty is not looking for a reason to fail a pilot, he wants pilots to succeed. There are some standards must be followed, but if the pilot is not perfect he’ll be flexible as long as air safety is being maintained. When we started our landings, first one was a soft field, which I did fine. The next was a short field. When I was cleared by the tower, I was asked to make a short approach and didn't get rid of the power quick enough. Smitty saw that I was going to be too far over the obstacle by about 100 to 150 feet and said, "Let's just make this one our go-around instead." We went around the pattern and I did the short field landing the next time. He saw that I was going to have trouble and he was critical, but he was flexible enough to allow me to try something else and attempt the landing the next time around.
I succeeded with the next attempt at a short field landing and when we took off again, he took control of the plane and asked for a northwest departure and took us up to 2300 feet and put me under the hood. He gave me a couple of headings to turn to, then we did two unusual attitudes (one nose up and one nose down), had me fly toward a VOR, and while he was doing this, we was giving me a scenario where I inadvertently flew into the clouds and tuned the radio to 121.5 to ask me what was significant about that frequency (it’s the emergency frequency). Then he had me take off the visor and ask me to figure out where we were. At this point I was allowed to use anything I wanted in the plane to determine my position, including the GPS. When we first left ADS, Smitty put the GPS in a state where it would not display anything helpful to me during the cross-country phase of the flight. I could not initially figure out how to get the unit into a more useful state (remember the nervousness I talked about), so I went to the VOR, used the CDI to determine with radial I was on and looked at the chart to estimate my position. I saw a big body of water in front of us and stated that we were just east of Lake Ray Roberts.
He replied, “Are you sure?”
I answered back with a slight pause, “yes.”
He said, “Okay” in a tone that seemed to suggest, we’ll just see about that.
We were actually east of Lake Lewisville. Afterward he explained that was going to wait to see if I got myself into any trouble with airspace or to see if I could find my way back to ADS.
He took over and got us to place away from any populated area and we did a couple of steep turns, slow flight, then to a power-off stall, then a power-on stall. Then he took over again and found a cross roads for us to do a turn about a point. He flew us into the turn so that he could give me a starting distance from the point and had me go around the point once. We went into the turn on the downwind side so I knew to start my turn with a steeper bank and start making the bank shallower as I began to fly upwind. We finished that maneuver and he said, “Let’s go back to Addison.”
This time I took a second to take a look at the GPS and figured out how to get the moving map to show up and pressed the “direct to” button and punched up KADS and headed straight for the airport. When we landed and were done, he did not say much, we went into his office, took my logbook and wrote an entry with our flight time and a comment that read, “Private test passed,” along with his signature. Then he picked up a booklet of blank Temporary Airman Certificates and filled one out. When he was finished he explained some things about the certificate and sent me on my way.
I'll write more later. I passed my checkride. Woooo-Hoooo!
