Flying Life: True test
Do you have what it takes when things go wrong?
It looked like a spaceship, with more buttons and lights than I’d ever seen in a cockpit. Are they really going to let us fly this thing? I wondered. Actually—yes, as soon as we got a certain number of training hours and jumped through various testing hoops, they were going to put 50 passengers behind us and turn us loose. I just couldn’t believe it. How could passing a checkride possibly make me qualified to hold the lives of so many people in my hands?
Maybe you’ve felt that way when you loaded your family for the first time in an airplane and felt the weight of that responsibility. Just because you passed a checkride, can you trust you have the skills you need to handle anything that may come your way in the sky? In other words, are the FAA airman certification standards an accurate measure of what makes us safe out there in our day-to-day operations as pilots?
In order to answer this question, I turned to the extensive accident studies conducted by the FAA’s General Aviation Joint Steering Committee. They concluded that most accidents are caused by “loss of control.” In layman’s terms, that’s stalls and spins. However, on the checkrides I give as a designated examiner, applicants rarely fail on the stall task. Furthermore, the GAJSC concluded that most fatal loss-of-control accidents occur during maneuvering flight, including takeoff and landing. But I test my stalls at cruise altitude without a runway in sight, and the applicant knows exactly what’s coming because they are stalling on purpose. If people rarely die from stalls they induce intentionally, does that mean the checkride is irrelevant?
I don’t think so. While that task may only be able to test an applicant’s ability to recover from a stall, I believe the other tasks test our ability to avoid stalls in the first place. Let’s take the steep turn maneuver. The standards are plus or minus 100 feet and plus or minus 10 knots. Most applicants can hold their altitude or at least make a correction back to it when they deviate. One common mistake, however, is a failure to notice airspeed as it degrades during the turn. We know this weakness causes crashes when pilots fail to recognize a slowing airspeed during an uncoordinated base-to-final turn. So, if you were able to perform a steep turn to standards on your checkride, chances are you understand the relationship between bank angle and load factor/increasing stall speed. Hopefully, if you ever feel that telltale buffet or hear the stall horn as you attempt to maintain altitude in a turn onto final, you will recognize the approaching stall and recover without further incident.
The same goes for the landing tasks. The standard says you must touch down relatively close to the point of intended landing or else make the decision to go around. The accident books are full of pilots who crash when they fail to go around after an unstable or unacceptably long approach. In that way, the checkride is a good measure of the thing that’s important: a pilot’s decision-making skills.
Another reason people commonly fail checkrides—and have accidents—is because of task saturation. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen pilots fail to retract their landing gear after an emergency descent maneuver because their minds are so busy keeping up with the high workload of a complex aircraft. People also do silly things on instrument checkrides, such as loading an approach for the wrong airport or failing to notice their CDI is deflected. They are so busy flying the airplane in instrument conditions or with a simulated engine failure that they simply can’t handle one more thing. If you ever feel yourself getting to that level of overwhelming task saturation, because of weather or inoperative equipment or just being in over your head with an unfamiliar airplane, do whatever you can to shed your workload.
I should note there is one thing the checkride cannot test for, and consequently one of the things the GAJSC mentioned as an underlying factor in several of the loss-of-control accidents: recency. A pilot can be perfectly competent on checkride day, and then fly so rarely that those skills degrade to another level entirely. Don’t let that happen to you.
On the worst day, when your engine quits or you’re dealing with challenging weather, can you trust that you have what it takes to handle that situation safely? Yes, because the standards you passed on your checkride are a valid measure of your skills, as well as your ability to handle several tasks at once. Combine that passing test with some recency of experience in a familiar airplane, and you should feel pretty darn confident in your abilities to get yourself safely back on the ground.
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