As of approximately 1800zulu today, I now posses a Private Pilot, Airplane Single Engine Land certificate. Woo!

I’ve been flying out of Santa Fe with Larry from Sierra Aviation once a week or so since I arrived in Los Alamos. I’ve spent a bit longer than expected getting ready for the checkride out here, but had to adjust to the differences between a Cessna 150 in Bloomington and a Cessna 172 in Los Alamos. For one thing, the air is so much clearer here that everything looks much closer than it actually is. The main runway at Santa Fe is also extremely black (it was refinished last year, apparently), and heats up really quickly in the western sun. This causes some interesting rising air on the runway, and equally entertaining downdrafts somewhere near the airport (generally off the end of the approach runway). So you end up with a large downdraft on final, followed by a constant updraft during flare. This can make a precision 200′ short field landing difficult, and mastering it took significantly more effort than I would have expected. A couple lessons ago, I flew a practice checkride with another instructor at Sierra and did really well, so I got a sign off for my real checkride, which was scheduled for this morning.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon. The weather in Los Alamos is sucking, and not in the afternoon monsoon way. There’s an actual front moving in, bringing storms into the area. Which basically means that the weather for this morning is going to suck. I was fearing yet another no-go on the check ride, which would have been a major bummer. I had to work up a flight plan for Santa Fe to Double Eagle in Albuquerque to Grants, then back to Santa Fe. Grants is a good ways to the west of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and was right in the path of the severe weather. During my weather briefing, the briefer strongly discouraged VFR flight to Grants, but that’s not a deal breaker because we weren’t going to fly that far anyway. I’d either pass or fail the cross-country section of the checkride by the time I got to Double Eagle (and, in theory, long before). The weather between Santa Fe and Double Eagle was iffy, but good enough to fly until noon-ish (which should be enough time). There was going to be a short period of borderline marginal VFR, but it would remain legal and safe to fly. I probably wouldn’t fly somewhere I didn’t know in the conditions, but it’s a pretty easy flight to Double Eagle, basically follow I-25 for a while and make a right turn once you get to the city.

The checkride itself was pretty straight forward. It started with an hour of oral testing, mainly going over flight regulations, flight planning for my cross country flight, and reading sectional charts. Nothing too horrible, and I did pretty well. There were a couple of things that I didn’t know, and one that I’m not sure the examiner had completely right (I read the regulations slightly differently, but these things are bit confusing). Then we went flying (yay!). We started with a cross-country flight towards Double Eagle. I was a bit off on my first checkpoint, arriving two minutes early. This was at least in part because it was much colder than I had planned for and I hit top of climb much earlier than expected, so I was going faster than planned. No biggie – I knew where I was and the first checkpoint is always a bit further off than the others because of climb and which runway is in use and all that. The second checkpoint I was about 30 seconds early to, but that’s well within rounding errors. That was enough for the examiner, so we went and worked on flight maneuvers.

Flight maneuvers went pretty well. Simulated instrument flight was fine. I was a bit more wobbly on altitude than I would have liked, but I kept it within the limits and never lost control. Unusual attitude recovery was ok, although he had some advice on improving my recovery technique to put less load on the wings (not a problem for these situations, but could be a problem if the attitude was really, really unusual (like, say, a spin or a steep developed spiral). Stall recovery was fine. Steep turns I pretty much nailed, although I didn’t do a positive enough clearing turn into the first one, which got me yelled at. The simulated engine out was transitioned into a simulated engine fire almost as soon as I hit best glide speed, so I nosed over into a 100 knot descent to “put out the fire”, rolled into a spiral, slowed to 80 so I could put down flaps and establish a maximum descent rate. That concluded the maneuvers portion of the checkride (yay – still alive and kicking).

Flight back to Santa Fe was slightly eventful. As I was climbing up to gain altitude before coming over the hill (still 8-10 miles out), a plane on the tower frequency was heading our way. I called in right away to give a position report, but didn’t have ATIS yet (I was just about to get the lasted report). Instructor wasn’t happy that I caused the tower to have to read the ATIS, but when he asked for explanation, he accepted my thought process that it was more important to make sure the very fast plane heading our way knew where we were than it was to save 30 seconds of tower radio time (tower wasn’t that busy anyway). First approach was supposed to be a soft field landing. I came in a bit high (mainly because there was not the standard downdraft off the end of 20 to suck my altitude away), so I decided to go around. The instructor was ok with that, and I nailed the soft field (with a nice cross wind) on the next attempt. Nothing like a soft field landing on one wheel, but it all worked out. The soft field landing went pretty well – it helped that the runway wasn’t a giant updraft. I hit in the first 50′ beyond the point, one of my best short field landings in the 172. The examiner didn’t like my technique for stopping. Larry (my instructor out here) goes by the book for short field – get the mains on the ground, lower the nose wheel, then pull back on the yolk while breaking. The examiner didn’t like the intentionally lowering the nose part, but wasn’t “fail me” unhappy. And it led to an entertaining discussion between Larry and the examiner after the checkride.

Everything is signed and it’s official. I’m a private pilot. I can now fly passengers in whatever little plane I can afford to rent. Hopefully, I’ll be able to start working towards my instrument rating in the fall.