Interview With IFCH Member @IF787 : Checkride Pass!
Last week, Infinite Flight Community Hangar member @IF787 passed his Private Pilot checkride! I decided to ask him a few questions about his experience during training and the checkride itself. Hopefully this can help inspire some of you reading to chase your own flying dreams!
Tell me a little bit about your training background. How long did it take for you to get to this point?
I started my flight training about 4 months ago, in late May. Over these 4 months, I logged 40.6 hours in a Piper Tomahawk (PA-38-112). I studied quite a bit over my entire summer, and managed to get a score of 93% on my written exam for the PPL (70% or more is a pass).
Has Infinite Flight played a role in your training? If so, what has been the most helpful aspect of using it?
IF wasn’t really a significant part of my training, but it was what kind of sparked my interest in getting my PPL. Meeting people through the community, VA’s, and IFATC and hearing their experience helped me in deciding to pursue this goal. I did fly quite a bit in IF over the past year, and the most helpful portion for me was becoming familiar with ATC procedures. This made learning about real life ATC operations much easier.
Describe your checkride- how was it? Was it easier than you thought it would be? Harder? What was the most challenging aspect of it?
My checkride took about 4 hours from atart to finish. We started with an oral exam about a wide variety of aviation rules, regulations, etc. This took about 2 hours to complete, but it will vary from test to test. After the oral portion was complete, we went for a 1.5 hour flight. During this time, I was asked to perform many different maneuvers I had learned throughout my training.
Overall, the checkride was challenging. The oral portion was slightly easier that I thought it was going to be, but I still got some hard questions. The flight portion was about what I expected, but it was not helped by the thermal activity that afternoon (bumpier, more work to maintain altitude, etc.)
There wasn’t a specific part that stood out to me as the hardest part of the test, just that it was overall a challenging test. You really have to put in the time to study material like the FAR/AIM and repeat maneuvers over and over to perfect them in order to pass the checkride.
What are your future plans in aviation?
My future plans are not set in place by any means, as I have several options. The end goal for me would to get my Airline Transport Pilot license (ATP) and secure a job at a mainstream carrier, passenger or cargo.
I plan to start preparing for instrument training relatively soon, and then hopefully commercial soon after, but I am waiting to see how my options for university play out first (bachelors in engineering or flight science, depending on the school).
Interested in meeting other IFC members who are real-world pilots or training? Join IFCH!