The checkride, officially known as the practical test, is the culmination of the training to become a private pilot. It consists of both oral questioning and a flight with the examiner. I never anticipated that passing might feel anything other than wonderful.
The oral questioning went quite well. I had been worried about this because I put too much of the studying off for the last minute, but this is the sort of testing that I tend to do well on. Gary Twitty (the examiner) asked much less about airspace or the charts than I expected, and he asked absolutely nothing about weather or light gun signals. Go figure. My biggest mistake was probably not knowing what happens to groundspeed vs. indicated airspeed at high density altitudes.
My flying, on the other hand, was probably as bad as it's been in a couple of months, or at least it felt that way. After starting off as if we were going on a long trip to Paso Robles, we stopped near Lexington Reservoir to do our maneuvers. My steep turns were fine, even though they have not always been consistent in recent weeks. My clean (no flaps) slow flight was fine, too, but then we did a power on stall.
I think that what happened was that I got more of a turn after the stall than usual, and as a result I was distracted from pitching down correctly. In any case, I think I saw the examiner reach for the controls, which generally means failure. After we were done recovering, I asked him if I failed, and he said "Not yet, but let's try that again." The next one was better, but still not as good as I usually do. After that followed some more slow flight and power off stalls (while turning), which didn't want to break at all.
Next was instrument work, which is the part where I wear a device to keep me from looking outside the plane, so that I have only the instruments to rely on. The reason private pilots train for this is not that we are allowed to fly in the clouds (that requires an instrument rating), but so that if we do somehow end up in the clouds we have a good chance of surviving. In any case, this part went reasonably well.
Next was turns around a point, where you make small circles around a point on the ground about 800-1000 feet below. In this case the point was on a ridge, unlike the flat areas I had mostly trained for this maneuver over, and it took a couple of tries to figure out which way the wind was blowing, but it actually went okay. This was the maneuver I felt least confident about before the test, so the successful result was a relief.
Now it was time to do some more landings. We had been in contact with Bay Approach since very early in the flight, so we went to San Jose International. The controllers were very busy with IFR (instrument) traffic, but after holding over the Pruneyard for a while and getting a last minute runway change from 29 to 30R, we landed. The runways at San Jose are much wider than the one at Palo Alto, of course, and this causes a common optical illusion of thinking you are lower than you really are. This got me, and my landing wasn't very good, but I think my immediate diagnosis of the cause saved me.
Next we took off out of San Jose, and as we were climbing out the tower warned us that a couple of other planes going that way had turned back before getting to Moffett. By now a weather front had arrived (at least an hour earlier than predicted by the forecasters a few hours earlier, and with substantially lower ceilings than had been predicted). Gary managed to find a route towards the east side of the bay which made me uncomfortable because we were low (800-1200 feet), didn't have much cloud clearance, and visibility was lower than I would liked, but we didn't have to turn back.
On the way back to Palo Alto we did the simulated engine failure. I hesitated too long choosing a field and starting to put my flaps down, which had to be accelerated because we had started so low. Planning ahead for this anytime you are flying low was a good lesson.
On the first landing at Palo Alto (where the weather had improved enough to not be a factor), the examiner asked for a slip, which was harder than it should have been because I hadn't come in high enough to need to slip. I detected some frustration in his voice over this, but he still hadn't told me I had failed.
Last was a short field landing over a pretend obstacle, which is a standard technique we practice. I came in lower than I should have and tried to compensate by adding power to slow my descent, but it wasn't salvageable, so I eventually decided to go around. The second attempt was much better, although I discovered when turning from downwind to base that I hadn't even brought my last notch of flaps up from the go around.
So I guess I feel bad because I didn't perform at the level I know I can, and I wonder if I would have passed me if I had been Gary with only today to go by. But Gary told me that my recognition of what went wrong is good, because he sees some people who don't know that they did anything wrong. He also said that it is hard for someone in my position to know what standard to compare myself to. In writing this I also see that I made fewer mistakes than it felt like I made while it was actually going on. And I plan to continue learning (the instrument rating is next), so I should continue to improve.
12/21/97:
Another day's perspective and some additional input leads me to a couple of conclusions: