Lesson 81 – Practice Checkride

I had a practice checkride with CFI Travis on Thursday of last week. I’m slow getting this posted because Georgia and I drove up to northern Wisconsin Friday morning for a family get together.

The oral portion of the practice test went fine. The only items that I need to work on are to get more familiar with the maintenance logs and to memorize the VFR required equipment list (tomato flames). I knew where to find the list in the regs but, I should have it memorized.

The oral done, we took off for the flying portion. I had planned a cross country flight to Madison and we started off on that course. I hit the first two checkpoints on schedule. After the second one, Travis had me divert to Galt airport. I knew the general direction so I immediately turned south then set the GPS for a direct route to the airport. Travis asked how I would find Galt if I didn’t have the GPS so, I demonstrated how I could locate it on my sectional chart.

Before we actually got to Galt, Travis had me descend to 1700 feet for some S turns. After those, we climbed back up to 3200 feet where I did some slow flight, steep turns and both power on and power off stalls. By now, we were almost out of time so we flew back to Waukegan. On the way there, I put on the hood for a few minutes of instrument flight. The wind at KUGN was from 300 so we landed on runway 23 to get a crosswind. That was the only landing we did. We just didn’t have time for any short and soft field work.

I thought my flying wasn’t very good at all but, maybe I was being too hard on myself. Travis asked Sandy to join us for the debriefing. He complimented my preflight planning, flight management and judgment. His only real criticism of my flying was that I wasn’t using the rudder properly. He thinks that if I can master that, it will fix whatever problems I have. I hope he is right, Sandy and I will be working on that and reviewing short and soft field landings during our next flight.