My private license...

[ryanv]

Hi all,

I'm sure my story here won't be the first but I guess it is still kind of special for me so anyway...

After nearly 10 years, 130 flight hours, 6 different type of airplanes and 5 instructors later I finally got my PPL checkride last weekend.

Congratulation you may say...well not quite. No no, I didn't fail! As a matter of fact I did really well...on the oral examination portion that is.

Well after 10 years and on the day of my checkride the wind picked up to 25kts gusting 32kts here in 4SD - yep the home of the Reno Championship Air Race. To make matter worst, during the preflight I found a busted strobe light on the left wing, and a broke grounding wire in the rudder on the DA-40.

We could argue that there are position lights, and in fact there is a secondary grounding wire in completely good working condition, the examiner suggested that we should schedule the practical for another day...in his word "I don't want to scare myself today"

You know the bugger part is after ten years and it came down to this not to mention I have missed 2 checkrides before because my instrutors at that time quited and joined the airline. Man, I understand sometime you have to pay your due but darn!

Anyway, what's 4 days to wait after 10 years right? The upside is I rolled right into my IFR training later today and made my first ILS and GPS approaches into Reno and Stead airport and a bunch of IFR maneuvers...so I guess the day was not a complete lost.

You know I have to say that my current instrutor is great...he came out to the airport last night and fill up the tanks so I would have a full plane this morning. It's hard to find a good one that doens't just want to clock hours on your coin...I think I'll stick out with this onr for awhile.

The funny part was my instructor and a bunch of guys I didn't even know were sitting upstair in their hangars with cold beer and transcievers dialed in waiting for me to come back and when they saw me taxing back to the hangar so soon...they all ran out with a horrify look on their faces especially my instructor!

Pilots are quite a special bunch aren't they?!

Well today I got up first thing in the morning and get my weather while stuffing my face with cheerios. I headed out to my "dentist appointment" - at least that's what I told my work anyway After moving the plane from the hangar to the pilot lounge I was still way early. I thought about going for a short one but nah...so I went to sleep on the couch instead. It's too cold anyway.

He (examiner) showed up late but I didn't mind because I was well into my REM sleep.

We pretty much got right into the plane and was on our way and it went like this:

-Quick flight brief from him and a quick pax brief from me
-Softfield take-off
-VFR departure according to my flight plan - we flew the first 20 nm right on the money
- Broke off from cross country into power-on stall
- The power-off stall
- Steep turns
- The slow flight
- Hood time
- Then emergency procedures all the way to touch down
- Then ground ref. stuffs, S-turns, Turn around a point
- Then we RTB
- While enroute we did unusual attitude
- Then soft-field landing at home base
- Then taxi around for short-field take off
- Follow by a short-field landing

That's it...he pulled out the old typewritter and the little piece of brown paper...I'm a legit pilot!