Category: Flight Training

There is pretty much no excuse. I just haven’t put anything here for a long time.

Today I finished my multi-engine commercial check ride! This means I’m almost a real pilot. If I had a job, I could get paid to fly. BUT, I’m already working on my flight instructor rating to work for the school here in Florida.

I did really good on the oral portion of the test, and did OK on the flight. Definitely could have flown better, but the weather and clouds got to me a little bit I think. Oh well. I passed, it’s finished, and I’m moving on.

It’s kind of weird, this check ride came so quick, I now have to endorsements on the same page in my logbook! Now I start working on my single-engine commercial rating. I doubt I’ll be able to finish it before Christmas break.

I’ve already started the flight instructor ground school. I’m about half way through that right now. It’s been good so far, but still mostly just review. We do have a few presentations that we have to give to the class at the end. I’m looking forward to it, even though I don’t like talking in front of an audience.

After extensive amounts of time off for vacation, and weather, and health. I’m nearly done! I feel good about the speed of my progress. Even though I’m about 4 months behind what I could have been, all things considered, it’s still pretty awesome!

Moving on!

This one was big. Today I passed my instrument airplane check ride. After nearly 4 months of working at it, taking a month off in the middle of it, it's finished. I wish I could feel like I can relax a little bit now, but it's on to work on my commercial license now.

We had about a two hour oral discussion before the flight. We talked about weather, my planned cross country, and en route procedures. There were a few times that I had to go into the FAR/AIM and the Jeppesen legend for answers, but I found what I was unsure about. There were a few things that I got stumped on, and I wasn't sure about a few others.

We went over all the weather charts, and arrival procedures, lost comms, the works. I felt that besides being stumped on a few things, that I did really well.

At this point we took a break, and I got ready for the flight. Got some new weather, filed our flight plan, and ran home to get a snack. My stomach was yelling at me, and I decided it best to feed the monster before the big ride.

We took off and headed towards our destination. First thing we did was a VOR hold. It was a fairly easy entry, and after getting the hold instructions, I ran through all the procedures. Double checked them in my head, read them aloud to myself, just to be sure. We entered the hold, I applied the wind correction and it pretty much worked our perfectly. It almost felt like I was just watching the plane fly itself. I got the timing down really good, everything was good. (good)

We started the approaches. First we did the ILS approach. After I got established inbound on the localizer, we simulated a failed engine. Completing the rest of the approach single engine, then going around for another. The second approach was a GPS approach to the same runway. We did this approach partial panel, which basically means I only have access to secondary instruments, and I have to use different instruments. This simulates a system failure in the aircraft. Instead of using fancy direction orienting instruments, I only have the magnetic compass, and the turn coordinator. There were some hiccups on this approach for me. I got a bad vector that made me over shoot the final approach course, and that put me behind the aircraft. I forgot to descend to a step down, which made my final segment a little tricky. Lucky for me the Seminole can fall out of the sky if you need it to. I missed some checklist items, but caught it, and cleaned it up.

After this we got our clearance back to Vero Beach. We then did the VOR/DME arc approach. This was probably the worst vectoring I've ever got from Miami center. We were sent around all of central Florida for this one. When we finally got vectored for the ARC, I think we spent a total of about 50 seconds on it. We both had a good laugh about it, and I turned inbound for the final approach. At this point I kind of let it get to me that I had been doing well. I almost screwed up the last approach because I was getting excited.

We did the circle to land approach, and after touching down on the runway, I felt a huge sigh of relief. I knew it was over, I knew I passed. I thought I would never get to this point. I was just glad I did as well as I always knew I could. I was having issues get over some certain things, and it was extremely frustrating. My first few flights had gone so well, and then later on I was screwing things up. Maybe it was beginners luck, whatever the case, I finished it.

Now I start my commercial multi rating. Hopefully I can be done with both my single and multi commercial ratings by the end of the month. After that, onto CFI.

After completing my commercial ground school class this week, I took and passed the written exam this morning. With a score of 95, it's the highest I've scored on any written.

I'm extremely satisfied with myself. I was feeling fairly nervous about this written. I feel that my score on this test was very representative of my career options. For some reason I placed a lot of weight on this test, and it motivated me to study harder. There were only two tests in my ground school test. I scored fairly well on both of them, but I knew I could do better.

It's also a relevant factor in being hired here at the school as a flight instructor. That put extra pressure on me to do well on this test.

Now that I have got this out of the way, I can focus on finishing my instrument rating. Now after about 4 days of solid studying of commercial material, I need to start studying instrument material again.

I hope to have this instrument rating finished in two weeks.

This week I have started doing commercial ground school. I still haven't finished my instrument flying, but I'm trying to finish while I'm in class. I only have 5 flights left in my instrument training.

The instrument training has been going really well for me. Besides having some minor issues with memory items, such as checklists, and when to do sequenced events, I'm doing really well. Most of my flights have gone fairly smoothly, with minor hiccups.

I'm currently waiting for a new instructor again. This is only about the tenth instructor I've had while training here. My current instructor is starting a program that takes up pretty much all her time. She will be instructing contract students with an airline, and will be unable to carry 'normal' students like myself.

If there is one thing that I can say nobody here likes, it would be the contract students. Basically they are treated the way you would think yourself deserves to be treated. They are given priority over other students, and they seem to be scheduled much differently. It is very aggravating to lose instructors, or scheduled time to these students.

Commercial ground school so far is a very basic review of what I learned in private pilot ground school about a year ago. I'm still waiting to be challenged in this class. I'm the type of person who can't stand listening to something over and over again. I know I've said it before, that sometimes the ground schools feel very repeated. This is still the case with commercial ground school.

I guess this is what you have to put up with at most 141 schools. Perhaps the lower flight time requirements make up for my torture in this class. I sure hope so.