Pre-Checkride Jitters

(Note to readers: I'm a couple of weeks behind in posts, but I'm trying to catch up.)

I've been having pre-checkride jitters. The checkride was scheduled for less than a week away -- on Friday, and my maneuvers were not quite perfect just yet. My instructor seemed to think I can do them within PTS standards, but on every flight, there seems to be some maneuver that is out of standard -- or barely within it. That's not good, because it doesn't give me a feeling of consistency. And without a feeling of consistency, I cannot feel good about the upcoming checkride.

With that in mind, I've scheduled flights for Monday and Thursday after work (someone else has the Arrow on Tuesday and Wednesday). Monday's flight was a simulated commercial checkride. I guess it went semi-OK: stall series was good, and so were chandelles and lazy eights. We then climbed up to 5,800 feet (Seattle Class B started at 6,000 at the point where we were); on the way up, we went over slow flight as well as systems emergencies. The following emergency descent (steep spiral) went well also. So far so good.

Then came the dreaded emergency landing. For starters, I've been having a lot of trouble with this maneuver, probably because it's more difficult to judge distance between yourself and the ground, and also because without power, I tend to stay high on the approach and overshoot the field as a result. During this simulated checkride, I picked a field, and I thought I had it made... Unfortunately, the field that I picked had a slight problem, which I did not realize beforehand: there were trees at the approach end, which meant it was not only an emergency landing -- but an emergency landing with an obstacle! So, as usual, I stayed high -- too high. In real life, I probably would have made it into the field OK, by holding a slip almost all the way to touchdown. But, this was not real life -- it was practice -- and we have to recover by 500 feet. And in my instructor's judgment, I probably would not have made it. Yikes! That's a failure on the simulated checkride. :-(

We proceeded to do some eights on pylons, but there was too much low level traffic in our practice area... So we couldn't really do them, and there aren't too many other areas east of Paine Field to do eights on pylons at. Why? Well, strictly speaking, you have to be in a "sparsely populated" area to do this maneuver, because typically you will be less than 1,000 feet above ground level. For me (and for my CFI as well), finding this type of area within reasonable distance was tough, so we decided to head back to Paine to do some landings. The landings were OK -- we concentrated on shorts and softs; the dreaded power-off 180 would have to wait until next time.

Debrief was at Jack in the Box over some fast-food dinner. During the debrief itself, my CFI actually was far more encouraging than I had thought: he just said -- pick a field without obstacles (if you can), set up for a normal power-off 180, and execute the landing. I say: easier said than done, but I sure will try to do it on the checkride. :-)

So, the conclusion was: we'll continue working on these maneuvers next time! Since the weather for Friday looked good, I had better be ready by then! :-)