Today I became a licensed private pilot.
Today goes down as the day that I completed my pilots license!!!
Check ride wasn't too bad. The examiner scheduled to meet me at the airport at about 8:30am, I was there about 7:45am, so I had a few minutes to calm down and reexamine my materials.
He got there about 8:15am and we got started shortly after. About 2.2 hours of questions ensued with a few breaks. My instructor figured he asked many questions because of my low flight time (48.7 hours total when I went into the check ride). Other people speculate that maybe he was enjoying talking to me. We chatted about rules, regulations, good ideas, bad ideas, experience levels, rules of thumb, and a few other things. He seemed to spend a good bit of time with the special VFR rules maybe even up to 30 minutes we talked about different aspects of special VFR. By the time we got to the section where he wanted to examine my planned cross country trip, I figured I was doing pretty good. I got the feeling he was impressed that I had weight and balance calculations for the takeoff and landing parts of the cross country flight. He ran through some for instance cases with the numbers on my cross country nav log. I was glad to have my old trusty hp 48gx with me, I whipped out all the calculations he wanted. Then he decided to focus on asking me some questions about the VFR sectional maps. Again that was fairly easy. I answered most of his questions very quickly. A little hesitation on a few items and he offered some help where I was able to complete the answering of the question. After we were done he stated "good oral.... very good oral...." and walked out of the room.
He ran through what he was going to be expecting on the flying portion of the exam. He said we would hit a few landings first, short field, soft field, and any others he might want to see. Then we were going to takeoff and fly the first leg of the cross country trip. If my math looked good on the first or second leg then we would knock off that and move on to some flying maneuvers such as: steep turns, stalls, turns around a point. He said if you get that all right then that will probably be it, or I might want to see some thing else.
So we got ready to go, we got out to the runup area and he explained that I can try to do the soft field and short field in one go if I want to. I decided to try it, although I got the short field part right, I did not quite get the soft field part on the first landing. -- touched down a little hard for a soft field. He did compliment me on the fact that I had NO BOUNCE at all even though I came down a little hard. The next go around I nailed the soft field landing, he was said he liked it -- right down the center of the runway. Next takeoff he told me to prepare for the cross country portion. We took off, I noted the time. we headed on out on the first leg. Got that all completed, he had me use the GPS for ground speed and calculate the time to my waypoints. All the math worked so we knocked off of that and headed up north. Added a little altitude and he wanted to see my steep turns. First to the left. One full turn, then to the right and about halfway through he said good, roll out on heading 270. (that was only about 3/4 a turn to the right) I got the heading, then he asked me to do a poweroff stall. I went through the procedure like we were going to land, carb heat on, throttle back, flaps in (I was going to go full but he only wanted about 30 degrees) then I pulled back on the yolk and a few seconds later we stalled, recover was quite simple managing the rudder properly. We leveled back out. Then he took control for a minute he turned us around asked me where I would land with the engine out. I picked a couple places and then he pointed out a grass landing strip. I wasn't able to just pick it out of the blue, but he obviously knew where it was. Then he gave control back and said to turn around the barn/hangar at the grass field (do a ground reference turn -- except we were about 3000' -- normally the ground reference turns are 600-1000 agl so this was a little new for me ) I turned around the barn about 180 degrees -- made a U turn basically, and he said ok thats good enough and asked me to do a power on stall. I pulled the power back, got it down to 60 mph, and went full power and kept the nose high, stall horn was blarring and we were not stalling. He said some thing to the effect of ok stop torturing the plane, and level off. He said boy this thing doesn't like to power on stall does it ? I said no we had had trouble getting to the power on stall. He informed that stalls don't hurt planes and I wasn't really torturing the plane. Then he took over and wanted to show me how to fly with the plane stalled -- fluttering I think he called it. He was having me pull the elevator to the stops and hold it ... as he kept control with the rudder. After he got done playing with my plane. He said "ok take me home". He had me make a call to downtown island traffice to announce where I was what I was doing and my intentions. After that point he pretty much took over the radio, chatting with other pilots about what they were doing. I swung back around made a 45 degree entry to the downwind on runway 8 and he told me that my flap motor has failed, he wanted me to land with no flaps. I asked him if he was trying to get me to do a slip to land, he said no do whatever you want, show me how you would land without flaps. I came around on base slowed it down a bit.... little more challenging without flaps... and as we were coming in he said using a slip might be a good idea you are a little high.... I did the slip, got down nice and smooth on the runway missed the center line by just a touch, but steered back over to it. We got off the runway and he said great lets go park. We went back to the rear tiedown area. he asked if he could have the controls a minute and park it for me ... I said sure... then he parked it backward and told me to shut it down. I said great except you parked backward. I think he might have gotten a touch embarrassed, I pulled up spun around and right back onto the tie downs. Went through the shutdown checklist. Soon as I took off the headset - he stuck out his hand and said congratulations. I got real excited then. He said I gotta run in to the restroom, you finish putting up your plane and meet me back in the school to get your papers done.
I got the plane put up and went inside the flight school where the guy that runs the place and another guy were there. Head guy says I understand congratulations are in order. I said ok ....thankyou. They still looked like they had seen a ghost. I was like what ? They said he said you were an excellent pilot. I said ok ? Brandon says "he doesn't say that very often" So Jerry shows back up we go print out my pilot license, and he tells me congratulations, he signs my log book, gives me a copy of my temporary license.
That was it!
I can fly whenever I want. (with weather and FAA rules as my limitations)
