Finally, we’re closing in on the finishing line. Today Pete and I went out and did a mock checkride. The plan was to fly this one, then with the school’s chief pilot, and then the FAA examiner. As it turns out, it went well, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Pete basically flew the same check-ride profile that John Lane used to use, which was to flight plan from I68 to Dayton International, then to St. Louis. He would have you climb (spiral) to 2,500′, and then ask you how fast you were going. The trick was to check your time over the departure airport, then at MGY a known distance away, then use your E6B to calculate your ground speed. With that done, he would ask that you figure ETE to Dayton, then declare “the weather over Dayton has deteriorated, we need to deviate to X”. In this case, we deviated to Dahio, a very short and hard to find airport just under Dayton’s airspace.
Step one was to pick a reasonable heading and time to the new airport, and two was to either talk to Dayton or get under their airspace. Then you have to find the airport. Here’s where Pete gave me an out. I would’ve totally missed the airport. The runway is tiny, and has NO markings. There are also practically no hangars, and so, it doesn’t really look like an airport. Really. It just doesn’t. Anyway, then I had to make a short field landing, taxi back, and a short field take-off. On departure we climbed to 1,000′ AGL and started ground reference maneuvers.
We did turns around a point and S turns, then climbed up to 3,000′ MSL to do slow flight and stalls, then on to steep turns where I did catch my own wingtip vortex. Once he was satisfied with that, he failed my engine and I made an simulated engine out approach. Once he was convinced I’d made the selected field I was allowed to recover and climbed back up and did some simulated instrument work with the foggles and the CVG VOR back to I68. One last soft field landing back home, and Pete declared me ready. Next week I’ll try to fly with Tom, the owner of our Warrior, though the weather is looking dicey.
Posted By: Brett FerrellSaturday December 1st, 2012 at 11:49 PM