Checkride Now

Colorado pilot Garth Fasano has launched a website intended to make it easier to schedule the checkride. Checkride Now is a community for DPEs, flight instructors, and pilots. Users can search for instructors or examiners, learn about their experience, check their availability, direct message them, and book a checkride or flight lesson.

Fasano was inspired to create the website after his own private pilot checkride. He’d boarded a commercial flight to Denver to take his at Centennial Airport, only to learn that the examiner had to cancel at the last minute. With a busy professional schedule and an airplane already rented, Fasano didn’t want to wait weeks for the examiner’s next available slot. He and his wife started calling examiners in the Boulder, Colorado area, but nobody had availability for the next two weeks.

Fasano eventually took his checkride but remembers that the last-minute stress of trying to reschedule “added a whole other element to my checkride. It was such an intimidating day, why add another element of confusion?” Some flight applicants have tried to address this problem by scheduling multiple checkrides with different examiners, but that isn’t a satisfactory solution when it means reserving a slot that could be used by another pilot.

During his successful checkride, Fasano peppered the examiner with questions on how the scheduling process could be improved. Most examiners don’t want to be answering phones or texts to schedule checkrides, he said. “They want to manage their schedule and have things that sync with their calendars and manage their business effectively.”

What started out as a tool to help examiners has since been expanded to include flight instructors, who can post their specialty, such as mountain flying, high altitude training, and other niche areas of flight instruction. “My hope is to help make general aviation safer by providing more opportunities for instructors to help educate pilots,” Fasano said.

Checkride Now is free for pilots looking for services, and users can schedule services free as well. To list their services, flight instructors pay 5 percent of each booking or $2 per booking, whichever is greater. Examiners are charged a monthly fee of $99. That may seem steep, Fasano said, but it returns its value by freeing examiners from interruptions at the dinner table to discuss their availability. Moreover, the site allows examiners to take deposits on upcoming checkrides, which helps to cut down on last-minute cancellations in busy marketplaces.

Checkride Now currently has instructors and examiners primarily in Colorado, Kansas, and Texas, but Fasano hopes the site will become a nationwide resource. Since its launch in 2018, the site has helped put together pilots and examiners for more than 350 checkrides. A custom, robust platform improvement launched late in 2020 has the capability to immediately expand the service nationwide, Fasano said.

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