Yay! The checkride was, ehrm. Interesting. But the important thing is that I’m DONE. It’s looking like in the interest of my flight school’s scheduling, I’ll be getting my multi engine rating next.
So, I just finished my final Commercial stage check. I’ve got a check ride to do next– they should be able to get to me before the end of the week. It’ll be my first checkride with an FAA designated examiner, rather than a part 141 check instructor. In other words, this will be with someone who works for the FAA and cannot be someone who works for the school. I better be a commercial pilot soon.
I was supposed to fly last Wednesday, but the weather was bad. I didn’t get scheduled again until this morning at 8am, but the weather was 800ft overcast. They’ve promised to do their best to get me done soon, we’ll see. I was signed off as being done with all my commercial lessons a MONTH ago. Admittedly, I failed a stage check, but this is ridiculous. Ridiculous.
And I’m still not a commercial pilot. A bit of a setback– while I passed the oral part of my stage check, missing only a handful of questions, the flight portion didn’t go as well. Mostly because I only had 9 hours in this type of aircraft, and I’d never flown the specific aircraft. The first part consisted of cross-country testing. I’d planned a cross country, flew it long enough to prove that I can calculate groundspeed and give a time to next checkpoint estimate. Then I’m told to head somewhere else. In this case, my examiner picked a grass…
I flew 2.0 hours yesterday. It was actually smooth out, and I managed to perform all of my maneuvers within the Practical Test Standards without any problem. I had forgotten how much easier it is to fly when things are nice and smooth. At one point, D. had me doing slow flight. He had me slow the plane down to 40 knots, the specified MCA (Minimum Controllable Airspeed) at full flaps. The plane will actually fly a bit slower that. “Slow down to 35 knots.” I did, flirting with a stall the whole time. With enough power and pitched up,…