Those with a PPL

Congrats on your success zamfire!

Sadly, I haven’t flown since my checkride…….still paying the school off. As soon as I get a chance I can’t wait to take a friend or loved one flying though!

Nice one Zamfire (and PhantomII)!

I know just what you mean about flying into the airshow. When I first did that in my Luton Minor at Old Warden in 2005, it was the realisation of a personal dream. THe only trouble is that it stays (expensively) addictive!!! 😎

Good one Zamfire!
I must admit flying into an Airshow is something I want to do once I re-certify

Congratulations to both zamfire and PhantomII on passing your respective PPL exams! As hard as it was to earn the rating it can be just as hard if not harder to maintain the level of skill you’ve achieved so far. Keep at it and your PPL will bring you years of enjoyment. As my primary instructor told me your PPL isn’t a license to fly, it’s a license to learn. Don’t stop learning.

Does your flight school have any traditions for passing a rating? We had to buy lunch for the airport and get a bottle of liquor for our instructor. Well we didn’t HAVE to but it’s hard to mess with tradition. 🙂 It’s amazing how many folks seem to be at the airport when it’s your turn to buy. I’ll admit that I would stick around after a flight if I knew someone was on a checkride with the hopes of a free lunch. 🙂 Flying it to expense to let a free meal go to waste. 😀

Passed checkride!

I finally got done , after an almost-cancellation yet again. I’m one happy camper. I was supposed to fly over to Riverside where the examiner has his office, my instructor didn’t come with me (he is off flying to Idaho), found the plane un-refuelled as usual, nobody in the office at 6.30 of course, bought my own fuel, called a briefer – he tells me Riverside airport will be closed all day from 9.30 to 5.00! My thoughts were along the lines of ?????? So I flew over there anyway and found there was a huge airshow starting. Landed in the company of lots of WW2 airplanes and other heavy metal flying around. 8.30 and no examiner at his office. I called him, hoping we could get out of there in time and perhaps we could do the test from Corona and I’d give him a ride back to the Riverside airport. He decided to meet me at Corona, I fly back there, more paperwork, and we go. This probably qualifies as one of the word’s shortest FAA checkrides: 0.9 hours and we’re done. Just three landings, five minutes of navigation stuff, five minutes of instruments etc. I was still nervous as hell since the first landing I gave him was mediocre and I thought perhaps I blew it right then. But I thought I did ok for the rest and when we got back gave him nice greaser of a landing, we taxied back and a handshake and more paperwork and we were done.

And finally for the first time since I was kid wishing I was on the other side of the fence at an airshow – I really was! Even if it was in a rickety old C-172….

Well done, we said you could do it if you just relax, narrate and enjoy it!:D

Thanks for all the kind words.

After paying off both the examiner and my instructor, I still owe the FBO the rental fees from the flights I’ve taken in the past two weeks…..that’s not very fun. 🙁

Excellent stuff, well done.

Neal

Good luck on your next attempt, and hopefully the weather will cooperate.

Just make sure you don’t rush it and go on a day you don’t feel comfortable on. I admit I was a bit nervous before taking off because I thought the wind would be too much, but it turned out to be better than I expected. So clear without a cloud in the sky too! I live in Florida about a mile from the Gulf Coast so, as the weather gets warmer, we’ll have more daily showers and storms, but yesterday that was not a problem.

Remember….your flight doesn’t have to be perfect. Just verbalize everything you’re doing to a certain extent and that will help.

Personally, I don’t have any plans for other ratings at this time. I start Air Force pilot training in August, and I believe you come out of that with several ratings anyway, so I suppose I’ll just let the Air Force pay for that.

I just wanted a PPL to be able to go ahead and fly on a nice day in a Cessna 152 or 172 when I feel like it.

Good show!

Nice to hear you made it. Hope I’ll get there too Wednesday morning, though once again the weather might interfere. And this is California!!

Congratulations! I hate to say it, but we told you so 😀 . Fly safe and enjoy yourself. Any plans to go further ?

Nice one, well done.

Greg

Many congratulations Phantom 😀 well done, knew you could do it 😉

Passed!

Thanks again for all who replied. I got to take my checkride today, and it was a success!

The examiner was actually a very friendly guy, and he explained to me exactly how the whole process would work. First he took care of the paperwork to ensure that everything was in order, and my CFI had done a great job of that so that was a cinch.

When we finally got down to business, it was kinda like a conversation. He would ask me a question, and I’d answer, and we’d talk a bit about the various subjects. It was pretty thorough and lasted several hours, but he told me beforehand that many of the questions were simple and you just answer them straight up without much explanation. If he wanted explanation, we’d usually talk about it. I didn’t know every single thing, but for the things I wasn’t 100 percent on, I had an idea and he would usually help me along a bit to try and get the answer. I never felt too much pressure, and it was just a very relaxing thing in general.

Once, that portion was done, we went out to the airplane and I did my normal preflight. He told me beforehand how the flight was going to go, and so up we went. He explained a few things to me along the way, and in general I was comfortable and confident the entire ride. I tried to verbalize most of what I was doing (he suggested that before we got off the ground), and it seemed to work out well as I felt like while my flight was far from perfect, it was good enough to suggest to him that I know how to control the airplane well and that I’m safe while doing it. This last point is a big thing……..it seems (and I was told this before today) that many examiners are looking for safety and confidence in your control of the aircraft. The flight lasted about 1.6 hours of Hobbs meter time, although it seemed to go much quicker than that. We even noticed a small forest fire on the way back that he wanted to go look at. He actually got on the radio to report it to Pensacola Approach, and so that was something interesting to see and hear. It’s interesting because today’s flight was the clearest I’ve ever seen it in this area. It was very windy most of the day, and I was afraid of how the strong winds would affect my flying. They did to a certain degree but not to what I was expecting. It also helped that they were out of the north the entire time and the airport I fly out of has a north-south (i.e. 36-18) runway, so we had a nice headwind for takeoff and landing. My soft field landing was the only one that really wasn’t all that great although he didn’t seem to bothered by it. We had a bit of a crosswind right before touchdown, and my reaction to counter it was a bit slow. He explained to me in the debrief how to go about dealing with situations like that, and he explained a few other things that I should practice on in the future.

All in all, it was a great day for me, and I’m proud to say I got my pilot’s license….now I just gotta pay off the flight school for my flight time from the past couple of weeks. That won’t be fun. 🙁

Anyways, it leaves me with a total of 89.1 hours after my checkride, and a new level of confidence in myself. Once I get some money, I’m anxious to find some places I can take short hops or cross countries too.

Thanks again for all your help. I’m proud to say I have joined the pilot’s community now.

Anyways, all in all it was a long and thorough affair, but it all went well.

I’m no PPL holder but this bit of info i was given holds true no matter what the test, its not the examiner that fails you, its you that fails you.
as said in above posts just make sure you are ready, learn from the mistakes you have made in the past, learn from others mistakes you have learned about. and your license when you get it isn’t a license to say you know how, it’s a license to keep learning.

hope this helps.

Greg

Yikes! I’m sorry to hear about your experience…..as if I wasn’t nervous enough about the whole ordeal already…..

My ride is scheduled for this coming Saturday morning and I flew today (Monday) and I’ll fly again on Thursday in preparation.

I hope I get it all right.

Failed Checkride

Well, the heading says it all. I had my flight test this morning (the oral was passed a few weeks ago at Riverside Mun. CA. Worried about the weather all weekend, very high winds. Not a lot of decent sleep. Felt ok though, right up to the point when we got into the airplane. Weather was perfect, sunny and calm. Then I noticed my mouth got so dry it was hard to swallow, to the point of being distracting (Bring water next time!), Pre-take off checks ok. Then the examiner’s door wouldn’t close. Left my seat to slam it shut from the outside. Get back in. And one more time. All this while holding short ready for t/o. Ok, back in the seat, strap my kneeboard back on, where is my pen? All this is adding frustration already. Finally, ready to go, short field take off – by the book, all fine.

Turn onto course, tell the examiner I will level off at 2,500 to stay below Ontario’s Class C space. Fiddling with the VOR to get on course. Suddenly he pulls power – ok; engine failure drill, I suppose. Then I glance at the altimeter:2710 ft. Hit the C-class airspace. End of story. All through my training I have always been very aware of airspace and not once veered into it accidentally. This was the last thing I expected to mess up on. We went through the motions of the engine out landing but I knew at that point it was over anyway. Maybe 6 minutes from take-off. Returned to the airport and did an OK landing. Pretty frustrating, but he was right, he can’t bend rules.
This was after several weeks of trying to get schedules anfd weather to co-operate, which they never did until today.

I learned something: No matter how confident you are and how well you think you fly, you will get nervous and you will not fly at your best. I was totally happy about my abilities, so at least I feel ok about failing on a point that even an experienced pilot might accidentally experience and not through a lack of general ability. Did I mention bring water? Bring water!! It was seriously distracting and an obvious symptom of nervousness. Or maybe chewing gum , or something.
I flew the same route last night (solo) and I was perfectly calm, everything was by the book and on the money. Today I had to work ten times as hard to do the same thing. My only consolation is that the more often you do something the less intimidating it becomes and perhaps my re-test will be less nerve-wracking.

But it’s still a bad day for me.

Good luck to everyone else who is about to do this.

Thanks for the info and story zamfire. Congrats on your achievement. I’m about to leave for the airport here in a few minutes to get in a few flights, and my instructor is going to try and schedule my checkride for two days from now, although there is a chance of showers. I hope the weather will just cooperate for the timeframe my ride gets scheduled for if it does get setup like he told me he was going to do today.

Checkrides

I was supposed to do mine a couple of weeks ago – I’m in Corona CA.
I did not sleep well the night before, as you can imagine. The weather looked dubious too. I got to the airport to meet my instructor, (who was half an hour late) to do the paperwork, which took longer that I expected. Then I was told the Maintenance Records for the airplane were missing. He drove me to the examiners office to start the oral while he went looking for it. The oral portion went ok. I seemed to recall most things, I did get one or two things wrong, but I did not pretend to know answer when I didn’t. It took about an hour, then he had another person’s flight test to do and told me to come back a couple of hours later. Meanwhile my instructor calls back and says my usual plane is u/s and he was flying over another. Not good. I have never seen two 172’s that fly remotely the same and these all had very different, instrument layouts and equipment. But I wanted to get it over with, so I said ok. Then the weather gets really bumpy, broken clouds downto 2500 AGL and sigmets out for turbulence. At that point I said, enough and told the examiner I was not comfortable to fly in this weather and in an unfamiliar airplane and he accepted that decision. Judgement is also something they examine, I guess. I got my letter of discontinuance which effectively told me I passed the oral (they don’t come out and tell you that). If I hadn’t , the exam would have started from scratch next time.
So now the flying part of my checkride is on Monday the 12th. I feel a lot
more at ease about now, I’ll get a couple more practice flights in before.

The oral was shorter than expected, I heard horror stories about those. I think having a good score on your written helps, he mentioned that my 92% was excellent. I did a lot of online practice for that, there are several websites that will give you practice exams and score them for you. And the oral is simply more of the same.

Also ,I think the average is around 70 hours to get your PPL in this country. I had over 80, but 12 of those were ancient history from 20 years ago. I simply enjoyed being let loose on my own so I did a lot of solo flying. Can’t hurt.

Good luck,

Is the checkride already booked? If an examiner has not already been selected then it seems that this is all still in the air. You need to remember that should you fail the test then it goes on your CFI’s record with the FAA. If he has too many students who fail then they will start asking questions. It is not in his interest to sign you off if he perceives you are not ready. As for getting together to go over likely Oral questions, well, that seems like a very good idea to me. I know my CFI did exactly that with me for the PPL, IR and Commercial checkrides.

As for putting the money down and possibly failing.. well, that is always a risk (and one you will have to take for every checkride you take). That is just the way of it I am afraid. If you don’t feel ready then postpone the checkride. If you do feel ready and your CFI thinks otherwise then ask him what areas he thinks you need to work on. If the CFI does think you are ready then you most likely are, and you should go ahead with the checkride.
One last thing… military guys are human too. The main thing is to be straight with them. The guy who took me for my IR and Commercial checkrides was an Ex-military Navigator. He was very friendly and put me at ease right away. Having said that, I was very well prepared on each occasion. There were two of us getting Commercial checkrides with him that day and the other guy was failed 10 minutes into the Oral because he was totally unprepared (Cross country wasn’t planned, he hadn’t checked the weather or NOTAMS etc etc)… so make sure you are well prepared. They will not expect you to know every answer (but you should know most if you studied hard enough). The worst thing you can do is try and pull the wool over their eyes. If you don’t know, just say so rather than digging a deeper hole for yourself. BTW, did you score well on the ‘written’ test?