Photography by Chris Rose
FAA designated pilot examiners (DPEs) and aviation safety inspectors will evaluate and test some 33,000 candidates in 2013. About 80 percent of these applicants—hopeful students as well as pilots looking to add additional certificates—will complete the ride and emerge victorious. The remaining 20 percent will not have a good day.
Will you be one of them?
If that sounds pessimistic, it’s not meant to be. Flight instructors work hard to ensure their students get the proper amount of preparation to go before an examiner, and pilots work hard to be successful.
On the day in question, one of three things will happen. If all goes according to plan, the pilot submits a completed FAA Form 8710 and airplane logbooks for inspection, passes the oral and flight portion of the checkride, and thinks, That wasn’t so hard! before going home with a temporary airman certificate.
If for some reason the checkride begins but can’t be completed—weather minimums prevent the flight portion from taking place, for example—the examiner may issue a Letter of Discontinuance. This means that the pilot candidate will complete the practical test on another day, provided he or she did not fail any other portion of the test.
And then there’s the third possibility, in which the pilot candidate fails to meet Practical Test Standard tolerances for one or more of the required tasks, whether during the ground portion or the flight portion.
Talking versus flying
Neil Bradon of Portland, Oregon, was excited to take his private pilot checkride, the culmination of a many-years-long dream to learn to fly, in June 2012. “I was never worried about the flying aspect of the checkride,” he said. “I knew I could fly…I was more concerned about the oral portion. Engines never interested me; I feared getting drilled on engine questions that I couldn’t answer.”
He got through the oral portion and walked out to the airplane with the examiner “confident that I was through the worst.” The ride started out well. The examiner asked to see slow flight procedures. “Everything seemed to be going according to plan,” Bradon said. “The DPE later commented after the checkride that at this point he thought this was going to be one of the easiest checkrides ever.” You’ve probably guessed by now that it wasn’t.
“The DPE told me I had a rough-running engine,” Bradon said. “At this point I froze and didn’t know how to respond. In all my training, I had never heard the words ‘rough-running engine’ in the same sentence.” He stumbled through a checklist, but failed to resolve the mock emergency to the examiner’s satisfaction. After it became evident that he had failed the checkride, “I could not get back on the ground quick enough,” Bradon said. “I never wanted to set foot in an aircraft ever again.”
What went wrong? Changes to the PTS took effect June 1, 2012—two weeks before his checkride date. One of those changes involved a new task under emergency operations: systems and equipment malfunction, in which the applicant is asked to take appropriate action for a simulated emergency such as a partial or complete power loss. Bradon recalls that he and his CFI discussed some of the changes to the PTS, but that there likely had been a breakdown in communications somewhere along the line. “My CFI thought I had the system malfunction nailed,” he says, but adds that he doesn’t recall that emergency scenario in his checkride prep.
The ability to review and learn the PTS before you go for your checkride has to be one of your best safeguards for ensuring a proper outcome. Fly to the standards, observe good safety practices, and don’t scare the examiner—in short, act like a PIC—and you will succeed. Examiners want you to be successful. But they cannot give you a pass on things like failure to conduct a clearing turn, crossing a hold-short line before receiving an ATC clearance, or any circumstance in which they have to take control of the aircraft.
Some days are better than others
Sometimes a failure to communicate can lead to a failure on the practical test. An instrument student flew a checkride with legendary designated pilot examiner Evelyn Bryan Johnson, known to her students as “Mama Bird.” Prior to her death in 2012 at age 102, Johnson had administered more than 9,000 checkrides and held a record for the most flight hours of any female—57,635.4.
The instrument student recalled in a blog that he was trying to fly approaches while enduring sharp pain caused by his headset pressing the arms of his view-limiting device into his temples. He didn’t mention it to Johnson because he thought that he wasn’t allowed to speak to her during the ride. Eventually the sharp pain distracted him so much that he made a wrong turn while executing a holding pattern. Johnson later told him she suspected something was wrong, and expressed disappointment that he hadn’t mentioned the problem. “We could have taken a break and worked something out,” she said.
The words you don’t want to hear
If you blow a maneuver during the flight portion of your checkride, your examiner must inform you that you have failed a maneuver. If there are tasks yet to be completed, you may be given the option to perform them before returning to the airport. Both examiner and applicant must agree to continue the test after a failure, and the examiner will allow the test to continue only if he or she feels it is safe to do so.
Should you continue? Yes. And here’s why. The more you can complete satisfactorily, the less you’ll have to do on your next checkride.
Once you return to the airport, the examiner will issue you an FAA Form 8060-5, Notice of Disapproval. Formerly printed on salmon-colored paper, the 8060-5 earned the dubious nickname “pink slip.” Today, the form is electronic and printed at the flight school or FBO. It will list the tasks that were considered unsatisfactory. Ignore the desire to crumple or shred that form—you’ll need it.
What next?
It might seem like the end of the world. You might feel as though you are the worst pilot on the planet. It’s not, and you’re not.
“The hardest part was leaving the flight school and meeting my wife and two children,” Bradon said. “They knew how much I wanted this ticket. It had been a dream for several years. The next few hours were awful. I had to break the news to the rest of my family back in the United Kingdom. I couldn’t think about anything else for the next couple of days. I was adamant that I would never fly again. I could not stop critiquing my performance. At no point did I focus on the positive aspects of the checkride. At the time, there were no positives. I was not prepared for a failure.”
Fortunately, there's a happy ending. “After a couple of days, I opened up on social media, explaining part of the story to my friends,” Bradon said. “Everyone provided words of encouragement.”
Pick yourself up, dust yourself off
Like Bradon did, you may think your flying days are over. Don’t believe it. The steps to finish up are quite simple.
You and your flight instructor will review the task or tasks you failed and take some additional ground and/or flight instruction. FAR 61.49 stipulates that you must work with your CFI until he or she determines you’re proficient to pass the (re)test, and receive a logbook endorsement from that flight instructor.
Schedule another appointment with your designated pilot examiner or FAA examiner and complete another FAA Form 8710. FAR 61.43(f)(1) says you will receive credit for the areas of operation that you passed, provided you take the retest within 60 days from the date of the original checkride. You’ll also need that original Form 8060-5—the one you didn’t crumple up and throw away.
Bradon needed to brush up on the system malfunctions portion of the PTS, which he and his flight instructor covered in one hour of flight time and one hour of ground instruction. “After that, I spent every given hour armchair flying the malfunctions,” he said. “I had friends and family members ask me random failure questions. At one point, my CFI told me I was overthinking this. I had to relax and take some downtime.”
A week later, he went up with the examiner, and in 30 minutes had passed the test.
It’s all in your perspective. Even if you think you’re the only pilot at your airport who wears the scarlet F, it’s likely not so (see “Who Passed, Who Failed?” this page).
No less a luminary than AOPA Pilot columnist Barry Schiff failed his CFI checkride at age 18. It didn’t prevent him from earning the airline transport pilot certificate at age 21, or obtaining every FAA category and class rating except airship, or enjoying a 34-year career with the airlines.
A year and several months after his bad day, Neil Bradon is an enthusiastic private pilot. He flies as much as he can, but he still chair flies too. “I like to think I am always conscious about being safe,” he said. “This checkride experience has made me realize that I should never take any flight for granted. Expect the unexpected always.”
Prepare for your checkride as thoroughly and as efficiently as possible. Study hard, know the PTS requirements, and face the day bravely. In all likelihood, you’ll prevail. But if you don’t, know that your journey to your pilot certificate doesn’t have to end with a piece of paper that says “disapproval.”
I recall what a pilot friend told a shattered wannabe private pilot after she failed her checkride: “When you get your license from the FAA, it doesn’t say how many times you took the checkride. All it says is ‘pilot.’”
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