Checkride

How Pilot Examiners See Aircraft

Pilots do not fly airplanes. Or helicopters. Or anything else. Every pilot flies a collection of systems that are skillfully assembled to become that pilot's passion. At least, that is how most designated pilot examiners see whatever machine you bring to your practical test. This is important for you to realize because in training, especially for private pilots, most ground classes and training manuals seem to treat systems as something separate from flying, an entity removed from the seemingly more important (or at least more immediate) world of stick and rudder. After all, we pilots fly our aircraft; we don't fix them.

Aside from the fact that the federal aviation regulations kindly allow pilots the opportunity to perform some minor repairs to their aircraft, there is far more to meeting the standards defining an appropriate level of knowledge of aircraft systems than rote recital of the number of cylinders per engine, or the required fuels and oils. Pilots need to know how the things that they operate while flying the airplane affect the airplane. Unlike familiarity with desktop computers - at which an astonishing percentage of today's applicants excel - understanding an airplane's intricacies may someday mean the difference between life and death. Pleasing your pilot examiner is one thing; pleasing the laws of physics is quite another.

The FAA's Practical Test Standards (PTS) for every pilot certificate that one might seek will specify a minimum standard of knowledge and skill in system operation. They do not say that you need to be able to clean spark plugs or change a tire, even though the regulations may allow you to do both. The FAA requires you to exhibit knowledge of at least the basic operating principles - that is, the "how and why" - of the systems aboard the aircraft you fly. Most examiners test to determine whether you can analyze common malfunctions and their causes, and make sound decisions when systems do fail.

A system failure does not automatically mean an immediate forced landing. This is an all-too-common response that examiners hear during oral testing. It often indicates poor understanding of aircraft systems. If you are preparing for a practical test, you and your flight instructor should think of your airplane as a collection of systems. Sit down. Do not reach for the pilot's operating handbook just yet, and don't rush to the shop to ask your technician about possible questions you might expect. Relax. Close your eyes. Picture your aircraft. It is not a flying machine, an eagle-like aeronautical entity, but an amalgam of systems.

You cannot command what you don't understand. An acceptable level of understanding demands questions, curiosity, and probing on your part. To merely know that a fuel system holds a certain number of gallons of fuel, and that a fuel pump moves the fuel from tank to engine, is simply enough to get airborne. What kind of fuel pump is installed? How can it fail? How would you know? When it does fail (not if, because they do), how will you know that it has? Is there a boost pump? How do you use it? When should you not use it? If a symptom indicating a fuel pump failure appears, can the true problem actually be something else? Does the aircraft have multiple, selectable fuel tanks? In your airplane, are the symptoms of an emptying fuel tank similar to those of fuel pump failure? If they are not, how are they different?

Examiners routinely find that the most difficult questions for applicants to answer are the scenarios establishing hypothetical situations with multiple factors - in short, questions that mimic real life. Pilot examiners' yearly training sessions, and the printed materials that the FAA euphemistically calls "job performance aids," all exhort examiners to test to the "correlation" and "application" levels. And the FAA is right to demand this. It is one thing to hear an applicant respond from rote memory that an engine has four cylinders, and quite another to hear, after asking for details about how cylinders burn their fuel/air charges, "These airplanes don't have spark plugs. They have magnetos." (Yes, I have heard this. Your examiner probably has, too.)

To help you, as a private pilot aspirant, prepare to captain your aerial systems collection, you have three best friends: the PTS, the POH, and the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge. If you seek to be a commercial pilot, you have an additional friend in the Airplane Flying Handbook's Chapter 13, "Transition to Different Airplanes and Systems."

A classic case to demonstrate this involves that pilot who, training in high-wing nosewheel airplanes, earns a private pilot certificate and soon thereafter craves to put the training wheel in back where it belongs. A little discreet searching divulges the availability of a wonderful tiny taildragger of 1940s or 1950s vintage still active and still teaching pilots to keep their brain alert and their feet squawking standby. And, oh! The brakes! Tiny button brake pedals tease the nosewheel driver into believing that the quality of stopping the intimidating taildragger will equal that of any aluminum toe-brake queen. At that point, all similarities to these braking systems part company. Not only did the designers of the 1940s and 1950s love the space-efficient heel brake in a tiny cockpit, but many of these used cables to yank brake shoes outward to make friction against the Lilliputian brake drum hidden in most taildraggers' wheel hubs.

The physics and mechanics of these brakes are quite different from the hydraulic brakes familiar to pilots at the twenty-first century's dawning. A lucky few pilot examiners get to conduct checkrides in these classics. If you are such a pilot-hopeful, you need to understand these differences. It is true that examiners test their applicants on the airplane provided for the practical test. But flight instructors and students should know that the systems discussed in the Airplane Flying Handbook and the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge are appropriate study items for well-rounded knowledge, rather than merely for questioning during a checkride. Only the rarest of examiners will ask about cable brakes when an applicant provides a modern airplane for the test. Those applicants providing a cable brake-equipped airplane may face a question or two about hydraulic brakes as well.

Many pilot examiners hear applicants express their desire to obtain a taildragger endorsement soon after winning their private pilot privileges. Most other applicants long to fly bigger iron even as they prepare for their practical tests by mastering their comparatively simple trainers. Because new pilots carry passengers on the pilot examiner's signature, most examiners extend their questions reasonably beyond the minimum required three systems for the private pilot, or five required of the commercial applicant. The systems specified in the private pilot PTS are the same as those found in the commercial PTS. That should hint to flight instructors and applicants alike that the importance of systems knowledge is no less for the pilot holding the lower privilege.

A sleeping danger lies with pilot examiners' concentrating on the same systems and the same questions test after test. Examiner questions that degrade to the point of predictability tempt flight instructors to train students for the test, instead of training for the career. This is one reason that many pilot examiners have several plans of action for each certificate or rating, or at least arrange subjects in a manner that allows flexibility in questioning.

Details matter. Some examiners ask for maximum temperature limitations on instruments like the cylinder head temperature gauge. Others become more specific, asking questions like "What does the manufacturer say is the optimum needle position on the cylinder head temperature gauge?" This is the difference between rote memorization and the correlation/application levels of knowledge. To which type of pilot will you entrust your loved ones? Each of the 10 or 11 systems discussed in the private and commercial PTSs can elicit memorization-type questions or scenarios de- manding that applicants have at least reviewed the system in question and asked self-generated "what-if" situations prior to engaging the pilot examiner. Your examiner can tell whether or not you have done this preparation, and so can life.

Dave Wilkerson is a designated pilot examiner, writer/photographer, and historian. A commercial pilot, he has been a CFI for 22 years and has given about 2,000 hours of dual instruction.