Check Ride – Part 4: A New Examiner, Let’s Do This!
It was Wednesday, 19 August, 1500 local time at a Class G airport 20 minutes from home base. I took off and flew east to meet the examiner at another airfield. The temperature topped 95 degrees, but the winds held below ten knots. The airport had the same traffic pattern altitude as my home field, and the same runway configuration as the airport where I first soloed. I was in familiar territory. All I needed was ten minutes of routine.
I met my examiner in the FBO, both on time, and we climbed into the airplane. Startup checklist complete, all stepladders in the baggage compartment. I keyed in my first radio call, and—nothing. I tried again. Not even static in my ears. I could hear the examiner just fine—nothing wrong with the plane—but neither she nor the other pilots in the pattern could hear me. Something was wrong with the headset. You’ve got to be kidding me!
I was wearing a different headset from the Bluetooth set I borrowed from my examiner for the first three parts of the check ride. It was an old pair of David Clarks that worked just fine solo but occasionally cut out when two people plugged into the radio system. How could I have forgotten to pack Plan B? My grand visions of ending the summer as a private pilot crumbled. After 70 flight hours, 231 landings, and 20 days in check ride limbo, I was stalled ten minutes and two touch-and-go’s from the finish line. Godspeed, PPL.
“That’s OK, I’ll make the radio calls.” My examiner’s voice rang across the radio waves like the voice of God, calling me out of purgatory. I froze, stunned. She keyed in our position and told the traffic we were departing for pattern work. I was still frozen. She turned to me and must have seen the whites of my eyes grow past the rims of my sunglasses. “Ready to go?” I blinked and locked the windows. “Ready.”
Two landings and ten minutes later, I was holding my paper private pilot’s license. Seventy-two hours after that, my dad and I took off with full fuel and a full baggage compartment for a hiking trip in West Texas.
Strangely enough, our four-day, round-trip trek was a reprise of my twenty-one-day check ride. On the first takeoff, we departed immediately after after a King Air 350. So I watched the wind, waited three minutes, and angled our climb-out to avoid the wake turbulence.
Two days later, halfway through the leg from Carlsbad, New Mexico, to El Paso, Texas, our alternator gave out, and we had an in-flight electrical failure. We landed with no transponder, no radios, and no flaps. But thanks to all the practice I did during the check ride, it was no problem. The private pilot exam, it turns out, was the best training I could have asked for before my first long cross-country flight as a private pilot.
