Check Ride

Well, I’m a pilot. Hooray! I had my check ride on Saturday the 19th and I was successful. There almost two hours of oral exam questions and 1.1 hours of flying. It was pretty windy on Saturday, but I’m going to cover that stuff after the oral. Here is what went down:

I had to plan a flight to Spirit of St. Louis (KSUS) airport. Spirit is on the other side of St. Louis and I think he wanted to see how I would treat the Class Bravo airspace. I of course am fearless and chose to go right through it. Obviously this won me points becuase people shouldn't be afraid of controlled airspace, it is actually safer than uncontrolled airspace. The flight planning portion was fine, he pointed some things out on the sectional chart and asked about them. We talked a little bit about 2 way communications and when I was required to talk to someone and then asked if the plane had a GPS. It didn't, and he was surprised, but kind of pleased at the same time.

From there we covered aviation weather and airspace minimums. I almost did this flawlessly, but overall I did a good job.
After about 2 hours of oral questions we headed out to the plane. From there he asked a few system questions about the gages and the placement of counter weights on the controls surfaces. I knew these becuase Nate has prepared me well. We took off uneventfully, even with a stiff crosswind and headed toward the first check point on my cross country, Boone County Airport. Once I had it insight, he diverted me and we did some air manuvers.

Here is the order of things on the check ride:
Take off
First check point
Clearing turns
Steep turns (we only did 180s)
Turning power on/off stalls
Spin awareness (he set up the plane where we would have entered a spin)
Hood work
- constant airspeed ascents/descents
- turns to heading
- unusual attitudes
- lost procedure (using VORs while under the hood)
Right after I took off the hood, I confirmed where we were and then he pulled the power and opened the door and window
He closed the door a little bit later but left the window open to add some confusion.
We were just south of the Sheridan airport so we landed there by gliding in. I did the soft field landing and take-off, then a short field Take off and headed back to TYQ (Indy Executive).

At TYQ we did two landings, one was short field and one was accuracy.J.C. stressed that when you were in the pattern, you should always be able to land if power is pulled out, so that the pattern legs adjust accordingly when you have a heavy cross wind. And that slips may be necessary. Also, he said when he flys his 172 (which is a 1983) he does no power landings as a norm. So I think I’ll going to start practicing them on my own. A complete no power landing is kind of nuts to me, but I guess it isn't a big deal if I practice them.

Now, with all of that said, here are the things that I think I could have focused on more:
- Gliding (all the way to landing with no power), especially in pattern
- Radio communications – I think I do a good job of it, but I wish I would have had more experience with it. (Specifically controlled airspace)
- Turning stalls – power on/off
- SIGMETs – Tango, Sierra and Zulu (I hadn’t heard of these before, but I made some good guesses about them) A sigmet is a weather advisory for the air, Tango is for turbulence, Sierra is for Icing and Zulu is for Visibility.
Overall, it was a good experience, and I probably would have had a better post if I was able to write this just after the checkride. Oh well, 2 weeks later isn't so bad.