A bit later than planned I finally had my commercial
checkride today. One of the requirements is 250
hours total time which I reached yesterday. This
is the 3rd checkride of the total 6.
I've flown quite a bit lately with Morten to get
ready for the checkride, and I've reached a level
where I feel confident in the maneuvres included
in the Commercial Pilot standards.
The checkride startet 0800, so I had to get up
relatively early to finish the last planning. I
had gotten the assignement to plan a cross country
to Avery County which is situated up in the mountains
in North Carolina. After all the hours I have done
in the past planning flights this wasn't a big problem.
Checkriden was done with Fred (aka Fast Finger
Freddy) which is the same examinor I've had on my
last two checkrides. We started with an oral exam,
which I had together with Kristian. This is where
Fred asks all the questions he wants to ask related
to the curriculum. This wasn't really difficult,
as we've gone through most of this quite thouroughly
in groundschool lately.
I was the first to fly today and I took off a little
before 1000. I started my cross country which went
straight trough practice area Delta. After gaining
some altitude, Fred asked me some questions regarding
diversion procedures before we ended the cross country
part of the checkride. Out in the practice area
I had to do stalls, steep turns, lazy eights, steep
spiral and 8's on pylons before we returned to Conway.
Here he gave me one engine failure, one go around
and one soft field landing forfore I taxied back
to the ramp. He managed to sneak in a couple of
things on me (hence the name Fast Finger). He messed
around with my gear indication lights (green light
is gear down) and he messed up the mixture control
(not enough fuel into the engine will result in
the engine caughing like mad when trying to apply
power). Fortunately straightened this out quickly.
I landed with a feeling that I hadn't doen anything
wrong, so I was pretty certain that I'd passed.
When I got back to the evaluation room after parking
the airplane, the temporary certificate was filled
out.
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Fred and me after the checkride. Fred has previously
flown for the US Airforce
and has flown alot of different airplanes.
9741B - This is Kristian taking off in the same
plane I used, half an hour after I passed.
My temporary certificate. The plastic card will
come in the mail in a couple of months.
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