Gotcha!

Your checkride: You've planned and dreamed about this day for a long time. The day you go from "student pilot" to "private pilot." After months of training and studying, it's all downhill from here, right? Not so fast. There are quite a few areas that, if you're not prepared for them, can jump up and yell "Gotcha!" during this all-important flight.

Of course, you know that on your flight test, you must meet or exceed specific altitude, heading, and other performance tolerances. But the checkride measures your knowledge and decision making as well as your physical flying skills. To help you be ready, AOPA Flight Training has spent some time with the experts to find out what kind of checkride gotchas may be lurking.

Ground portion gotchas

"Most of my 'failures' occur during the oral, not the flying," explained Doug Stewart, FAA designated pilot examiner and 2004 National CFI of the Year. "And where I find people really unprepared is with the weather stuff. Most literally don't know the difference between an airmet and a sigmet." You do, don't you?

"They might be able to tell me what they are, but that's all," said Stewart, who is in North Egremont, Massachusetts. "They can't give me an example. I ask and get this deer-in-the-headlights look from them. It's right there in the [Practical Test Standards] and mentioned as one of the tasks in the objectives of weather." If you think it's bad to botch part of the oral, think about the applicants who are gotchaed before they get that far. "Incorrectly filled out 8710-1 forms are a big problem," said J.J. Greenway, chief flight instructor for the AOPA Air Safety Foundation. "That's the application for the checkride. I've seen applicants book a three-hour block for their checkride and get turned away because it is wrong." You can avoid this particular gotcha if you use AOPA's Electronic Form 8710, available at AOPA Online. The electronic version walks you through the form step by step and lets you print out a completed copy that you can take to your checkride and give to your examiner (the FAA doesn't accept electronic transmissions just yet).

Greenway also said that applicants fail because they didn't look over their logbooks closely enough and made sure they meet all the criteria. "Things like the 100-mile [cross-country] requirement, the night requirement, the amount of instrument time you have," he said. "The regulation says you have to have three hours of instrument training. Students show up with 2.8 hours, and there's nothing you can do about that. You can't take the checkride."

Stewart shared a recent example where even though a checkride applicant had logged the required time, things still were not as they should have been. "I noticed that although he did have the required three hours of instrument instruction, the recommending instructor had not given him any of it," he said. "The gotcha is that the instructor doesn't know if his applicant can meet the standard either. Shouldn't the instructor know that?" "That's more the fault of the instructor than anything else," Greenway said. "But the student needs to be aware of his responsibilities."

So you can eliminate many of the gotchas by being well prepared from the moment you walk in the door of the flight school. "There are a number of good preparation documents available that I consider essential for people getting ready for checkrides," explained Michael Gaffney, president of flight training at Skyline Aeronautics in Chesterfield, Missouri. "Buy and read an oral test guide and practical test guide. It helps organize your mental framework to get ready for the exam.

"A lot of examiners complain that they get applicants who have never seen these test standards," he added. "It seems obvious, but students just don't use it."

Gaffney also stressed the importance of using your checklists during the preflight. "That's one thing the examiner is going to be looking for," he said. "You're not going to impress the examiner by having it memorized. Take it with you and use it. They'll see right through you if they see you are carrying it around and not actually using it."

"You'll also have to show that the airplane is airworthy," Greenway cautioned. "This happens more in Part 61 training than in Part 141." Regardless of the circumstances, if an applicant shows up with an airplane that's not airworthy, the flight test cannot happen.

Another little thing that can snowball into a big gotcha is getting hurried. Take your time. If you rush, you get stressed, and stress leads to mistakes. Treat your checkride just like you are taking a friend for his or her first airplane ride. Take time to explain things to the examiner. If you miss something, go back and do it again. Checkride success is not the swiftest but to the safest.

They'll drive you to distraction

OK, the engine is running and you're taxiing toward the runway. No gotchas hiding here. You wish. "As examiners we are 'encouraged' to create distractions and make those distractions as real as possible," Stewart said. "I will try to distract an applicant during ground operations. When you are a private pilot, your family and friends are all talking to you, so I talk to [the applicant] like a passenger might: 'What's that or that?' "Remember the applicant is the pilot in command during a checkride. It's the only time that a student can be the PIC with another person in the cockpit," he said. So he or she needs to act like the PIC. "The student should turn to me and say, 'You are distracting me, please stop,'" Steward said. "If an applicant does that to me, they get a gold star. Show me you can manage the airplane and the situation."

"If anything occurs during taxiing, like you have to change frequencies or check something on a chart, the aircraft should be slowed or, better, stopped until you can concentrate on the task at hand," Gaffney said. "Examiners will want to see if you can be distracted enough to let the aircraft wander off the yellow line or start to cross a hold line at the runway. If the examiner has to take the aircraft, even on the ground, the ride is over."

Air work gotchas

"The first two or three minutes of a flight tell an examiner an enormous amount about the applicant and their preparation," Gaffney said. "First off, know and use your V-speeds. Use your trim." And for goodness sakes, be coordinated in your control inputs so the ball stays centered.

"The examiner is going to want to see how you have prepared for your cross-country. They will ask you where you are. They want to see if a distraction will throw off your navigation and nav log," he continued. "Can you watch your primary instruments, charts, nav log, and look outside the airplane?"

As Stewart said, the goal is to distract you and see how you will handle the situation, so it is as close to a real-life scenario as possible. Sometimes it is very subtle. "The examiner will get you into a conversation about something and see if you can maintain your altitude plus or minus 100 feet," Greenway said. "Maybe they will ask you to reach in the back and get something.

"I've heard of examiners dropping pencils on the floor and asking the applicant to reach down and pick it up," he continued. "When they look back up, the airplane is in an unusual attitude or something."

Oil pressure going down; blood pressure going up

Examiners are also including a lot more situation-based scenarios into their checkrides today. "We are being encouraged in the PTS to use scenarios," Stewart explained.

The example Stewart gave is his favorite. Instead of doing a simulated engine failure, he will tell the applicant that the aircraft's engine oil pressure is going down and the temperature is going up. What does that mean? What should he or she do? "It's a diversion from what they expect. How will they handle it?" he said. "I'm not just testing on their knowledge of emergency procedures, it's an entirely different way of looking at the process. "Do they recognize the signs of an engine problem? Will they change their destination? When will they start looking for an emergency landing site?" Stewart continued. "How they react when things don't go as planned, that tells me a lot."

Another popular engine-out gotcha is for the examiner to simulate the engine failure close to an airport. The applicant gets so involved with trying to figure out the problem and find a suitable farmer's field that he forgets to look around for a runway. If your examiner pulls the engine, take a moment and look on his or her side of the airplane--or just behind you--for a runway. Your examiner will be impressed.

Stewart shared a scenario he uses during simulated instrument flight. "We've just gone IMC. What do you do?" he continued. "Well, they all want to do an immediate one-eighty turn. That's fine, but what do you do if the clouds have closed in around you? Climb. How high? Descend. How low is it safe to go? Can they find the information on the charts and not lose control of the airplane?

"Scenario-based training is all the gotchas a pilot can encounter all rolled up into one," Stewart said. "It's training to see if someone can fly an airplane like they are going to. It's testing aerial decision making." Most aircraft accidents are the result of bad decision making, not poor stick-and-rudder skills, he noted.

Get ready for the gotchas

So what can you do to be ready for any gotchas your examiner can toss at you? Carefully read the Private Pilot Practical Test Standards for your upcoming checkride--it's never too early in the training process to meet this important document Ask your flight instructor to run you through a few of these testing scenarios. How will you react if things don't go as planned during a flight?

It's also a good idea to fly with a different instructor and do a practice checkride. Flying with a different body in the right seat will change your outlook. A stage check will provide this opportunity. And what do you do when the examiner starts trying to distract you at the most inopportune times?

"Here's my advice on handling most distractions," Gaffney said. "When you are asked a question by the examiner during a flight, especially if it is during an important phase of the flight, if the question has nothing to do with what you are doing, then you should suspect that it is a distraction and ask the examiner if they will please hold that thought a second while you stabilize the airplane. When you have everything settled down, you will be happy to answer their question.

"That is a perfectly legitimate and acceptable response to those kinds of situations," he added. "In fact, that's probably what the examiner really wants to hear you say. What you have done is prioritized the things that you are doing, focusing on flying the airplane, and saved the distraction for later."

Improperly completed paperwork, lack of preparation and practical knowledge, reactions to distractions--they are all common checkride gotchas that may get someone else, but they won't get you.

Dale Smith is an aviation journalist living in Jacksonville, Florida. A private pilot, he has been flying since 1976.