10/23/2014
KSUT
C152 N48842
1.3 hours PIC, 43.2 hours total
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I did it! I passed my checkride!! I'm a pilot for real!
WARNING! SUPER LONG POST!
tl;dr: I got asked questions then went flying. Apparently I did alright. 
I was scheduled for this afternoon at 2pm, but because I still needed to go over the airplane's logbooks and inspections with the owner (who is also its mechanic), I got to the airport early at 12:45. When I walked in, the DPE was already ready for me! She had another checkride before me and I guess they finished up early. So while we were waiting for the owner to get to the office from the hanger, she and I did some of the initial stuff like signing the IACRA 8710 online and checking my logbook for the requirements and endorsements.
That's about when the owner got there to go over the maintenance records and the aircraft's airworthiness. The DPE actually decided to sit in on that discussion, which was pretty nice because she got to see my interact and ask questions about things. For example, he forgot to show me the ELT inspection and battery due date, so I asked about it. Because she got to see all that, she asked nearly nothing about the aircraft docs during the "official" oral.
Disclaimer:
I'm going to try to be as complete as I can, but there's no way I'll remember every question, nor will I get every question worded exactly how it was asked.
Anyway, the owner finished his spiel and the DPE and I started discussing things. We looked at planned cross-country first, which was a direct flight from KSUT to KFAY. She looked over my flight plan and we talked about the checkpoints, though she made it clear we'd only make it to the first one before diverting. She asked if I had performed a weight and balance (I had), so she looked that over. I showed her where I had plotted it out on the center of gravity moment envelope and how we'd be within the limits, though loaded fairly far forward. I actually had a lot more prepared for the XC, like an official FAA Flight Plan form filled out and a complete route weather and NOTAM briefing from DUAT, but she had seen enough and we moved on to talking about the sectional.
The sectional is her big thing. It's what everyone has said about her and I agree. She asked things like:
- What is the white box around the Charlotte area?
- What airspace is at Charlotte airport?
- What is the magenta ring around Charlotte?
- Why are the runways at Charlotte not have circles around them like others do?
- Do you need a transponder to go to Charlotte's airspace?
- How about to fly above it?
- What class is Fayetteville's airspace?
- Can you fly into this MOA?
- Can you fly into this Restricted area?
- What class is Wilmington's airspace?
- What's the gray ring around Wilmington?
- In the info box for Wilmington, what does CT mean?
- What is 119.9?
- What does the star beside 119.9 mean?
- What does the C in the circle indicate?
- What's the elevation of Wilmington?
- What does the L mean?
- What does the atrisk by the L mean?
- How long is the runway?
- What does 122.95 mean?
- Why does it say "Raleigh" underneath the Wilmington VOR info box?
- What frequencies could you call the FSS on?
- What frequency would you listen on?
- What's the cloud clearance requirements in Class B airspace?
- Class G during the day?
- Class G during the night?
- What does an airport with a non-filled circle mean?
- What does an airport with an H mean?
- What does an airport with an F mean?
- What do you need to enter class C airspace?
- What do you need to enter Class B airspace?
- What airspace is Henderson (ACZ) airport in?
- What's the ceiling of that airspace?
- How about outside the magenta ring?
- What's the little magenta flag mean?
- Does this airport have a lighted beacon?
- Does this airport have services?
- What's the little parachute symbol mean?
- What are these blue lines (victor airways)?
- What altitudes do they cover?
- How about these gray lines (military training routes)?
- Why are they significant?
- What does the number in the little blue box beside the airway mean?
For the ones that I didn't know, I just told her that I wasn't sure and would have to refer to the legend (which she had folded under). She wasn't interested in me actually looking up the answer, but seemed satisfied that I at least knew where to find the information.
We then moved on to covering topics that I had missed on my written knowledge test. She had written down the categories of the questions and would ask me if I remembered which question I might have missed. If I could remember, we'd talk about that question, but for the ones I couldn't, she would just think of a question in that category. The categories I missed and the corresponding questions were:
- 123 (aircraft performance - airspeed)
- If you fly from colder temperature to warmer and your indicated airspeed stays the same, what has happened to your true airspeed?
- 194 (collision avoidance - scanning techniques)
- Tell me some ways you can avoid a midair collision at different classes of airports.
- 466 (V speeds)
- (We talked about V-speeds later, so no specific question here)
- 369 (aerobatic flight requirements)
- What's the minimum altitude for aerobatic flight?
- 366 (accident / incident reporting and preserving wreckage)
- Can you move aircraft wreckage?
- 192 (types / formation / resulting weather)
- If the surface temperature is 70F and the dewpoint is 45F, at what altitude should you expect the base of the cloud layer?
Medical topics:
- What's hypoxia?
- What does the law say about drinking and flying?
- Why might flying after scuba diving be a problem?
- What's carbon monoxide poisoning?
- How is carb heat related?
- What do you do if you suspect CO poisoning?
Aircraft systems, performance and limitations:
- What instruments are gyroscopic?
- What powers each of them?
- What's Vx for this airplane?
- Vy?
- Vfe?
- Maneuvering speed?
- Why does it change with weight?
- What does the rudder do?
- What does the elevator do?
- What causes a spin?
- Can we do spins in this aircraft?
- What category does this aircraft have to be in to do spins?
- How do you recover from a spin?
- Why is having a very rear CG undesirable?
- Does the airplane perform better or worse at high altitude?
- What effect does a high density altitude have on aircraft performance?
- How much fuel is needed for a night flight?
- Day flight?
Weather:
- What causes a thunderstorm?
- What's a convective sigmet?
- Airmet?
- What does it mean if the airport beacon is on during the day?
- What's wind shear?
- Why is it a problem?
Other:
- How often do you need a biannual flight review?
- Do you know how much ground and flight training that entails?
- What's a high performance aircraft?
- How about a complex aircraft?
- Do you need an endorsement for either?
- If a twin engine aircraft has two 180hp engines, is it high performance?
- What do you need to have in order to carry passengers at night?
- Between what times can you log night landings?
- How about night flight?
- What does it mean if ATC tells you to line up and wait?
For the ones I didn't know, she just wrote down the topic on her notepad. After the barrage of questions completed, she said she was ready to go fly, but I was pilot in command and it was up to me to make the call if the conditions were good enough or not. But if we did fly, she didn't need a passenger briefing, if she said "let's go" that meant to do a go-around, and I wouldn't be able to redo anything so take my time setting up. She mentioned that she's supposed to distract me during the process but believes that her presence is distraction enough, so wouldn't be doing anything specific to distract me. She stressed doing clearing turns before maneuvers but told me to just tell her I wanted to do one and she would direct it. She does it this way in order to snake us back toward the airport so that we're nearby when we finish.
The winds today were not ideal. Pretty much direct 90º crosswinds at around 8, gusting to 14. But I've flown in similar conditions before, so I told her that we would go fly. She went out and got in the plane while I did preflight. With that complete, I started the engine and began setting up my radios. She told me that this part of the flight was all about using pilotage to get to my first waypoint, so she wouldn't let me use GPS or the VOR and switched them to a different screen/frequency. We started taxing out and when I just about had gotten to the end of the runway, I realized that I had forgotten my sectional!!
I confessed my mistake to her but then realized that I had an 11x17 printout of the local area still in my flight bag from a previous flight! I pulled it out and showed it to her, and she said that as long as it was good with me, she was fine with it. Whew! Crisis adverted!
The takeoff was a short-field takeoff. I corrected for the crosswind beautifully and on liftoff she commented that I had made that crosswind seem like nothing. I noted my takeoff time and we started on the cross-country. Along the way she asked me if I could show her on the sectional where we were, which I did by pointing out a highway/powerline combo we had just crossed over. As we approached my first checkpoint, I pointed it out to her and recorded the time. We got there a couple of minutes quicker than I had planned, but it was close enough.
She then told me to divert to Ocean Isle Beach airport (60J) and asked me to figure a heading to it and to estimate the distance and time. I told her that before I did that, I'd go ahead and turn to the general heading in case we were diverting for a thunderstorm or something we needed to get away from. Luckily, the heading from my position to the airport paralleled a V airway nearby, so I told her I would just use the heading of that airway, 240º. As far as distance, I used half the distance between two lines of latitude to estimate about 15NM, and since the wind would help us out a bit going that way, that it would take us 10 minutes or less to get there. She was satisfied with all that.
The first maneuver we performed was a steep turn. I elected to do it to the right and it went ok. Not my best, not my worst, but good enough.
Next was slow flight with flaps extended. After a cleaning turn, we got slowed down and she had me perform another clearing turn in slow flight. From there we went right into a power-off stall, which thankfully went fine! The left wing dropped a little, but I recovered and all was well!
On to a power-on stall, which also went well. I was sure to slow the airplane down before starting so we wouldn't be at a high angle for so long, and she liked that. On stall recovery, I returned the nose to level flight and had to be careful not to stall the plane again. Thankfully I was on top of that because it did get close. I'd later learn in the debrief that she prefers low-power airplanes like the 152 to let the nose drop a little below the horizon until some more speed is picked up.
I then donned the foggles and we did some simulated instrument work. Nothing too fancy, just turning to a heading and then descending while turning to a heading. She then took the airplane and we did a couple of unusual attitude recoveries, which went great. Compared to the ones my school's CFIs put me through, these were easy!
After I got my foggles back off, she kept flying the airplane and asked me to tune in Grand Strand's VOR, ident, and tell her what radial we were on. I did this without any problem, so she gave me the airplane back.
Then the engine died.
I pitched and trimmed to best glide and then started looking for a place to land. I saw the beach and said that it would make a pretty good landing place. She said "the beach is good, see anything else?" I saw a golf course and pointed it out. "Ok, anything else?" About that time I realized that we were probably right on top of the airport! Hey, I had been under the hood for a while, I wasn't sure exactly where we were! So I said that I'd go for the airport and she said "I was hoping you'd say that."
While were were heading toward the airport, I mentioned that this is when we could do things like squawk 7700 and call on 121.5, which we had been monitoring during the flight. We were already set up on a right downwind for runway 23, so I told her I would just stay with that since we were in an emergency. Another airplane had recently called that he was using runway 5, so I got on the radio and announced my intentions. The other plane was another one of the instructors and when he realized that we were doing a checkride, they went elsewhere.
I was still about 1000' too high once I got pointed toward the runway, so I did a 360 which put me on final at about 1000' AGL. Still a little high. I probably could have just used flaps, but I slipped the plane down to lose the rest of the altitude. At about 400' AGL, she was satisfied that we'd make the runway and said "let's go!" so I did a go-around.
After leaving the airport, she said that I needed to do a ground reference maneuver, so she'd like me to just demonstrate a good rectangular course in the traffic pattern. I returned back to the airport and entered a downwind for runway 5. She said that the crosswinds were too much to try a soft-field landing, so she wanted me to just give her a good normal crosswind landing. On final, she said, "Hey, if you're up to it, see if you can put it down on the 1000' markers." I gave it a shot and on touchdown, she said "Looked like within 200' to me. We're finished, you can turn off the runway at D."
Really?
After I taxied back to parking and shutdown, she asked me to describe the process for a soft-field and takeoff and landing. I did, she turned to me and said "congratulations!"
On the debrief, she just went over stuff I wasn't sure of or got wrong during the oral and offered some very good suggestions on how to improve some of the maneuvers that I had done. Then I had a temporary airman certificate and we were done!!
My dad had come down to watch and support me, so I turned to him and said, "Wanna go fly?!"
So we went and buzzed around for 20 minutes or so and I can now say I've flown my first passenger! Feels good to be a pilot!
For those interested, my total investment was right around $6600.
