My Flying Career

Well it’s official, I am a Commercial Pilot! For multi-engine aircraft at least. How did the checkride go you ask?  I’m glad you asked!  The checkride is a pass or fail situation, so I am unable to give you a letter grade or percentage.  But what I can give you is how I felt it went.  The checkride  consisted of two parts, the Oral quiz, and the Practical flight.  The oral was about 2 hours long and I felt very comfortable answering all of the questions the examiner asked.  Examiners tend to like to find an area that you seem to know the least about, and question you for more details on that subject.  On this particular checkride, she found out my inexperience with crossing the U.S. border and what steps are needed in order to do so.  I knew the basics.  You must have a radio operators license, you must call ahead to Customs and let them know you are coming.  However the examiner was also very practical, and I told her I would certainly not plan on crossing the border without first studying and questioning someone who has.  From what I’ve heard, it’s not something you just go willy-nilly doing without first knowing what’s going on.  She asked a lot of questions about VFR operations.  I had no problem answering those.  She also asked a lot of questions about performance in the Seminole, which I thought was weird, since I already had my Private Multi-Engine license and had already been drilled on a previous oral about that.  But hey, I’m not complaining, I knew all the right answers!

Ok, onto the flight.  When we started the Oral portion the clouds were reported at 3,500 feet broken and expected to continue like that for most of the day.  I was really worried that we would only be able to knock out the oral portion of the practical test that day because I needed at least 4,000 feet AGL to do an Engine-Failure, which was required on this checkride.  By the time we finished the oral to go flying the ceiling had raised to 7,000 feet.  Sweet!  Well, almost sweet.  There was a 12 gusting to 17 knot 20 degree crosswind.  Oh joy! Welcome to the start of fall.  Now it’s important to note, I have not flown the Seminole in a crosswind of this caliber before.  But again, the examiner was great and said, “lets just make our first trip around the pattern a normal takeoff and landing so you can get a feel for the crosswind”.  Off we went, takeoff was great, immediately went into a crab on climb out.  But man, the downwind leg went super fast with that tail wind.  In a matter of seconds I was putting the gear back down, few more seconds later I was turning base to final and trying to slow her down.  First landing was not terrible.  A little bit harder of a touch down than I like, but within standards.  Anyway in an effort not to make this blog post unnecessarily long, I will just say, the rest of the flight went very well, my best landing (which was honestly my main concern for the flight) was the short field landing, and it was beautiful.

Ok, so what are my plans now.  What’s next on the list of accomplishments for my career?  Well I need to get my Commercial Single-Engine addon.  This will just add Single-Engine privileges to my existing Commercial license.  It should be a faily short Oral (just questions about the performance of Single-Engine aircraft) and then the flight.  The flight has some different maneuvers than the twin.  So I need to get up and practice the maneuvers a bit before I take the checkride.  I expect to take my checkride in the next few weeks.  After that, I will start studying for my flight instructor ratings.  I would like to get all three flight instructor ratings.  The CFI (Certified Flight Instructor), CFI-I (Certified Flight Instructor – Instrument), and an MEI (Multi-Engine Instructor).  In order to take those checkrides, I will need to knock out three knowledge tests.  The CFI-A, the CFI-I, and the FOI (Fundamentals of Instructing).  I will also need to start practicing the same maneuvers I did for my commercial rating from the right seat.  And also practice teaching.  I need to be able to explain to a non-pilot how to perform a maneuver.  So my friends may be getting some free flights, provided they listen to my jibber-jabber for a bit and tell my how I did.

Thanks to everyone for their continued encouragement and support.  It really helps having people interested and encouraging me to “keep it up”!  So I thank you.

Until next time…

Hey Everyone,

Well here’s the lowdown on what’s been happening.  I’ve been polishing my skills in the Seminole to a point where I am comfortable taking a stage check (practice checkride pretty much).  My normal instructor was out of town last weekend, so I was placed with another instructor, and I don’t know if it was the nerves or just not my day, but I wasn’t flying so well…  Little mistakes here and there.  So I opted to do one more lesson with my instructor before taking my stage check, just to at least bring back up my confidence.  Well we did that and I felt really good about it.  So next step…Stage check.   Hoping to get that scheduled this Monday or Tuesday.  It’s been a little difficult considering they were running all the Seminoles they had pretty hard, and just recently, they got one taken out of commission.  You can read about it here.  Kind of a scary story considering I’ve flown that plane a few times.

On the time-building side of things.  I have gotten to fly all over the place in order to just increase my total time.  I’ve flown to North Bend (KOTH) a few times.  I like North Bend, because usually it has the opposite weather as Salem.  If Salem’s got crappy weather, North Bend is usually nice.  If Salem has nice weather, I can usually find crappy weather at North Bend to practice approaches.  It also has some fun approaches to do, however there are a couple of approaches that take you a few miles out into the ocean.  And I don’t know about everyone else, but flying a single engine piston airplane 5 miles out into the ocean at 2000 feet, is just unnecessary.  I don’t think I could swim 5 miles in 40 degree water(or 70 for that matter).  I’ve also flown to Astoria and Tacoma-Narrows.  I REALLY like Tacoma-Narrows.  Just an insanely beautiful flight.  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t bring my camera on that one.  However, I did see the Les Scwab jet there (I believe it was a Cessna Citation).  For those of you who are in the area, Tacoma-Narrows has a fantastic restaurant on the field.  I’ve only had their burgers, but those were amazing.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

The Piper Seminole I flew

Well I FINALLY had my first day of Multi-Engine flight training.  I was sick on Wednesday and the weather was terrible so I wasn’t able to have a lesson that day.  But Friday was an awesome day to fly!

I can basically sum up my first multi-engine lesson with one word. Overwhelming!  There are only twice as many engines as I’m used to, but there is about 3 times as many things to do.  Not only is this my first time flying a multi-engine airplane, it is my first time flying a complex airplane.  So retractable landing gear, and the constant speed prop are all new things to me, on top of having double the engine controls and instruments.  We flew over to Scappoose to do some maneuvers.  We did Steep Turns, Power-off stalls, and 4 touch-and-goes.  The first touch-and-go was crazy!  Trying to keep track of the manifold pressure, propeller RPM’s and look out the window, AND look at my checklist was just crazy.  But by the 4th time, I think I was starting to pick up on the cues and memorize the checklist items.  That’s the best way for me to learn, repetition.

All in all it was extremely fun, and when we started heading back to Hillsboro, I felt like I was starting to get it.  Oh yeah, one thing I have to start memorizing is the stinkin’ cowl flaps.  Holy cow, cowl flaps up, cowl flaps down, cowl flaps up, etc.  Thank God for checklists.  My instructor said that he thinks I have the basics down pretty good, and our next lesson will be all single-engine operations.  Yay!

Ok, on to pictures, I didn’t take a ton of pictures.  But here are the ones I did take of the plane.  Enjoy!

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Met with my instructor yesterday to discuss the nitty gritty before our first lesson, tentatively set for April 1st.  We went over a little bit more detailed syllabus, signed some paperwork, filled out a logbook audit, which is basically every crazy combination of flight hours you can think of.  Dual Night, Solo Night, Total Night, Dual Night X-country, Solo Night X-country, Total Night X-country, and so on and so forth.  It took quite a while to fill out.  I can’t imagine having to fill one of those things out if you had like 1000+ hours.  Took me long enough with ~140 hours.

After working through all that, I went down to the FBO store and bought a Seminole POH (Pilots Operating Handbook) & laminated checklists and the Cessna 172P POH & laminated checklists.  Yay! More books to read!  I’m actually very excited to have the Seminole POH.  After going through the King Video’s it will be nice to know, when they say “this is only for hydraulically actuated props”, to be able to know, “Hey, the Seminole has Hydraulically actuated props!”.  :-)

So between now and next week, I will be memorizing checklist items, reading the Seminole POH and building some more time in the club plane.  How very exciting!