Wow, I can’t believe I am preparing for my Commercial Multi-Engine checkride (or the official name, Practical Test)! What a ride it has been so far, and it is only just beginning!
The last several weeks I have been working towards meeting time requirements, cross-country requirements, practicing maneuvers, and studying for my oral. All in preparation to meet the PTS (Practical Test Standards) on the day I have to shine the most.
As I have been preparing for my checkride, I notice a few things different about this checkride as opposed to any of the others I have taken since. For one, this checkride is a culmination of practically everything I have learned to this point. This is not like an Instrument rating, where the examiner can only really ask you questions about Instrument related issues. Or a Multi-Engine rating where the examiner can only ask you questions pertaining to Multi-Engine aircraft. This is a Commercial certificate, which basically gives the examiner the right to ask you questions about nearly anything I’ve learned up to this point. The amount of knowledge I need to know and have readily available is much larger than my other recent checkrides.
Anyway, last Wednesday, I took a practice oral exam with one of the senior flight instructors at Hillsboro Aviation. I felt pretty confident about my knowledge. My biggest challenge was getting what was in my head, out my mouth. For some reason I really struggle with putting what I know into short, concise, detailed statements. I turn them into these huge bloated paragraphs that in turn confuse me and the guy asking the question. It’s frustrating to me, because I know the answer, I really do. But when I put it into words, I sound like an idiot. Need to work on my communication skills I guess.
The flight portion of the practice checkride we scrapped due to weather. The weather wasn’t terrible, but I needed 4,000 feet to do single-engine maneuvers in the twin, and it didn’t look like we were going to get that. I opted to just wait until next week and do all the maneuvers at once instead of breaking it up into two flights. So barring any weather issues, I’ll do the practice flight this Monday and let you all know how that goes.
Tags: checkride, commercial, hillsboro aviation, oral exam, studying
