I am an official pilot now. I took the checkride yesterday, and passed. It took 5 ½ hours, and wasn’t as bad as I had built it up to be. They assign an FAA examiner to fly with you and have you go through all of the maneuvers you have supposedly learned. They check to make sure that you can hold altitude, heading, and not pose a threat to yourself or others in general. Of course, I had this picture in my head of a big smelly nazi who was going to try to make me fail by throwing all kinds of complicated problems at me, and then point and laugh when I went home with out my private ticket. As usual, I was wrong. He was a nice guy, just interested in my competence as a pilot. He told me what he wanted to see, asked me what I would do in certain situations, asked me about the maintenance log of the aircraft, and quizzed me on regulations a little. Then we were off into the wild blue yonder.

My first task was to show him that I could fly the plane from point A to point B without the help of electronic navigation aids. I had a map, a compass, my eyeballs, and a clock. In theory, you should be able to fly a heading for a certain amount of time and know when you are passing visual checkpoints. Theory worked out well for me in this case, and after about fifteen minutes and proving I knew where I was, he said, “okay, let’s say the weather is bad and you have to go to Newnan airport instead.” Find Newnan on the map. Mark my position and write down the time. Turn to the general direction of Newnan. Figure out how far away Newnan is. (For this purpose, I had marked my finger in increments of five nautical miles to the scale of the map, and measured the distance that way.) Then a little head math- 35 miles away at a speed of 97 knots is about 18 minutes. He seemed satisfied with the procedure, and said “Okay, put on the foggles” Foggles are these glasses that restrict your view to the instrument panel and are meant to simulate flying in zero visibility. The weird thing is that your senses have to be completely ignored, because they will lie. You’ll think you are straight and level, but you are actually spiraling toward the ground. He had me do some turns and stuff that way, then he took the plane and made me close my eyes while he did a few turns to get me good and confused, then handed me the plane. I still couldn’t see outside, but the instruments were telling me that we were banked at 45 degrees and headed down at thirty degrees. The airspeed was climbing, so the thing to do was pull back the throttle, level the wings, and gradually pull the nose up. Pulling the nose up too fast at too high an airspeed can cause bad things to happen, like wings coming off and such, so I didn’t do that. He was happy with that, and I took the foggles off. Just as I am getting oriented, he pulls my engine. No, he didn’t turn it off. That would be stupid. He pulled it back to idle and told me to find a place to land so we don’t die. I happen to know that he will fail you if you don’t pull this one off, and you only get one chance. I also knew that I had just paid $300 for the privilege of taking this test, so I didn’t want to screw up. I trimmed the plane up to glide as long as possible, got out my engine out checklist, and was told to put it away, because if the engine really stopped, you wouldn’t really care about the checklist. I verbally went through all of the things I would check in an effort to get the engine started, he said it was dead, and I had been scanning for a place to land. There was a grass strip right below us, and I did a circle around it, found it too awkward, and changed to a field that was straight ahead. I soon realized that I was too high and turned to the left, where I saw a beautiful sight. A big long delicious grass strip, and I was nicely 90 degrees to it and off one end about a quarter of a mile, and I had 1000 feet of altitude to lose. I flew it in, got it lined up, and he said, “okay, go around”. Quite proud of myself, I throttled up and climbed out. Now I had no real idea where we were because of all of the excitement, and he said “Take me home” I also know that he will fail any student who gets lost, so I was very interested in figuring out where home was. Luckily, I had flown around the area before and knew some of the landmarks. I saw a rock quarry, a pond just to the west of it, and a small airport a little bit northeast. He told me I could use whatever I wanted to use for navigation in the plane, and I chose to guess. I pointed in the general direction and started back and explained how I knew where we were. He thought that was pretty cool.

We got back to the airport where he is based and he had me do a few different kinds of landings. My instructor and I had shot so many landings in the previous week that I would have hung myself if I had messed one up. No problems there. Finally, he said, “Okay, park it and we’ll get you a license”. I thought I was going to cry. After he had typed my temporary ticket up and sent me on my way, it felt like my feet weren’t even on the ground. I was all smiles and happy stuff. I got in the airplane for my first flight as a private pilot- bringing the airplane back to Falcon Field, about ten miles away.

I took off and flew at 3000 feet with the windows open and wind blowing through the cockpit, relishing the fact that my hands were no longer shaking and the sweat was finally drying. I enjoyed those ten minutes more than any of the previous 67 hours I had spent in an airplane.

When I landed and was taxiing back to the flight school, I saw my dad waiting on the ramp with his 500 watt “That’s my boy” smile in full bloom. Now both of his sons are pilots, and we will sit around the table and mom will make fun of us for talking about v-speeds, spatial disorientation, lift coefficients, and ILS approaches. My brother and I are in the Multi-Engine Program now, then it’s on to instrument training, and then our commercial tickets. After that, I guess it’s a job flying airplanes in some capacity. There is much to learn, and we have the best reference material we could wish for. We can only hope to be half the pilot our father is.

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