Pilots: Sting Operation

So began Chris Lewis’s post to his Facebook network on the evening following his private pilot checkride. While every checkride is noteworthy, Lewis’s day came with a surplus of memorable moments. It started at 2 a.m. when he woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, knowing his exam would begin in six hours. It ended in a hospital room with a new grandson.

Lewis took his checkride on July 3 in Nogales, Arizona, roughly 200 miles south of his home airport, Pegasus. He flew down the day before in a friend’s Cessna 172. Unable to sleep, he squeezed in some extra studying, then got to the airport early—just in time to see an examiner fail a pilot on his multiengine checkride. “As it turned out,” says Lewis, wryly, “that was my examiner.”

Nevertheless, both Lewis’s oral and practical tests went well and he was feeling confident as the examiner asked him to set up for his last maneuver, a short-field landing. That’s when things got really interesting. As Lewis was turning onto the crosswind leg, a tarantula hawk blew out of a vent. This is no ordinary bug: The sting of this two-inch-long spider wasp, rated second behind the bullet ant on the Schmidt sting pain index, is debilitating. Unnerved, the examiner hollered, “I’m allergic to those! I’ve got the controls! Kill that thing!”

The insect flew across the windshield and landed next to Lewis, who was wearing shorts. Lewis kept his cool, grabbed his airman certification standards book, and went to work handling his first real in-flight emergency: dispatching a giant wasp. “It’s a tough bug,” he says. “I had to really squish it to kill it.”

Once the tarantula hawk was dead, Lewis asked for the controls so he could execute the short-field landing, but the examiner had had enough. Having seen firsthand that Lewis was a safe and well-trained pilot who could keep his head in an emergency, the examiner instructed Lewis to execute a full-stop landing at Nogales, where he congratulated Lewis on an exemplary checkride and joked about the power of DPEs to summon all kinds of distractions.

Temporary certificate in hand and thinking the climax of his day was now behind him, Lewis sent one of his buddies a quick text. “I did it!” he wrote. “I got my license.”

The text back wasn’t what he expected. It read: “Did you talk to Donna yet?”

“Nope,” replied Lewis, explaining that he planned to call his wife when he had time for a longer conversation.

“You may want to call her,” came the reply. “[Your daughter’s] water broke. She’s in the hospital.”

Lewis got on the phone immediately. He learned that his daughter, pregnant with her first child and due in late July, unexpectedly went into labor 15 minutes after Lewis started his oral. Family and friends had conferred and decided not to contact Lewis until after his checkride, as they didn’t want him distracted during the exam.

Lewis knew he needed to get back to the Phoenix area right away. But by now the monsoons typical of Arizona summer afternoons were starting to build. The air had been rough during his checkride and Lewis knew it would only get rougher. “I made the call to leave the plane in Nogales and took a shuttle back to my truck at Pegasus Airpark because of the high density altitude and mountain winds,” says Lewis. “So my first decision as a new pilot was not to fly, even to get home to a new baby.” He arrived safely at the hospital about two hours after his new grandson had been delivered by emergency C-section.

Lewis tells all this very matter-of-fact, exuding calm just two days after these life-changing events. How, we wondered, did he learn to handle stress like such a pro? “I’m a retired state prison deputy warden,” he says. “I’ve had to make a few decisions under stress.”

As a new private pilot, no doubt he’ll have to make a few more—and no doubt he will make them well.