Friday, July 14, 2006

Flight Instructor Ride Passed!

In a very hot and exhausting day yesterday, I passed my flight instructor checkride.  The weather in the morning was super shitty.  Would have been an awesome day to fly in the clouds, but I needed to fly in the morning with my instructor before we left, and we couldn’t even get high enough to fly the traffic pattern.  The checkride was scheduled for 11:30 am, and he pushed it back to Noon but said noon was the latest we could get started.  Another guy I know named Brian Marsh was scheduled with me.  Finally it started breaking up a little and I was able to fly with Nathan in the pattern for 2 landings.  He signed my logbook and Marsh and I sped off to Medina airport at full throttle at a fairly low, yet not illegal altitude.

The examiner was his usual self; it’s fairly easy to talk to him but you better not relax or say anything that he’ll have you elaborate on.  Marsh flew first as the weather barely cleared up to acceptable.  His ride was fairly short.  He passed, which is good.  So up I go and we do about 7 or 8 takeoffs and landings.  Luckily, I had some fairly good landings, even my emergency (he pulls the throttle to simulate failure and you have to land).  He always likes to do it in a spot where you’ll have to make a choice and I went for the right runway.  That’s good because I should be able to do it anyways though.  After about 50 min of just traffic pattern work we finally went out for the maneuvers.  Two steep turns, min. controllable airspeed, a departure stall, a lazy eight and two chandelles.  My first chandelle was a little weak from not having done one in about 3 months, so he made me do it again.  My second one was better.  He finally said take me back to the airport so I did, expecting him to pull some sort of emergency again but he didn’t, only said to make the last landing a good one, which turned out okay.  It was so damn hot in that airplane.  Oh well it’s over and I’m a Certified Flight Instructor!  Fear in the hearts of children!