Flying Lesson #95 - The Serious Pre-Checkride Program

By the act of simply scheduling a solo I can make the weather absolutely sucky. Two cancelled days in sequence where I had booked to fly solo on Saturday and with Monday having been scratched due to thick fog, rain, wind, and a Low IFR overcast layer all at once it was time for a dual lesson with Bob the new instructor. Ray is now no longer a part of the picture, possibly more on that later.

I get to the airport and before even checking over the plane, Bob pulls me in for a preflight brief as to what were going to do - a serious pre-checkride flight where he'll call the maneuvers, I'll do them and then he'll go over them if they need something pointed out to improve them. This sounds good.

So I preflight the plane and N73455 is ready to go. We get a bit of a lowish overcast around 2,500 that slowly works its way upwards as the flight progresses.

I do a nice takeoff and we start heading northeast, with a slight delay as the tower has us stop our authorized turn and to fly north for a bit for separation from another flight.

We get out to the practice area and we start with slow flight. I'm a little ham-fisted and while my procedure is perfect I lose more than 100 feet of altitude while setting up for it, so we go over it again and I get it right.

Then we move on to a power off stall and again good procedure but I lose a bit more altitude than I should during setup but then get it done right after he shows me a bit more of the finesse that should go with it and the recovery.

Then we do a power on stall, which I haven't done in a long, long time, and I do it perfectly.

Then we turn to turns around a point, which again I haven't done in a long while but once I settle down I do a very nice one and he's quite happy with it.

Then on to one of my personal hang-ups, the S-turn across a road, and amazingly enough I just did it and did it pretty darn well.

Then on to an engine-out emergency landing which I flub again due to lack of practice, and we go over it, he demonstrates it, and then I do it and do a good job of it but it still needs practice though.

Then we head back to Pontiac and we initially get a base call at 2 miles, but before we hit that they have us extend for traffic and then clear us to come in and I do a perfect, and I mean perfect, approach and cross-wind landing all on my own.

After the flight we have a debrief and he says my flying is good and my procedures are good, but I need to look outside the plane more and there's just a bit of polishing to do on those maneuvers, and he expects that we will work on those and get this done and get me ready for the checkride.

That's 1.4 and one darn nice landing.