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.

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,