Saturday... the checkride

I arrived at the school at 9:30 am, I made sure I had everything I needed for the checkride with me. Foggles, money, Id's, cross country flight plan, performance charts... I finished up the airworthiness information for IFR on that morning. (Annual, VOR check, 100 hrs, Altimeter, Transponder, ELT..) It was a very busy morning; my instructor had 3 students with checkrides. One of them was a private multi-engine, a commercial single-engine and me; however, I was the only one who was going to take his test at another airport, so he had to call an instructor from KLZU to come to KMDQ with me since ATP doesn't allow solo flying for students in the Seminoles.
The instructor from LZU arrived and pretty much I handled all the radios all the way to KMDQ. We taxied to runway 2R and off we went up to 6,000 feet. The air was smooth and we requested Huntsville Approach the RNAV  to runway 18 at KMDQ.



We arrived at Mr Clyde Shelton's office. It was pretty impressive, he had tons of awards and pictures with Geoge Bush, McCain, etc. He told us some nice stories about the good ol' days of flying and computers, very nice person.
We went ahead and started the oral; I think it went pretty good but you also learn a lot from him. The first question he asked me was if I knew how to calculate Va.. I didn't.. he provided me with a piece of paper with the formula written and asked me to calculate Va for our flight.

 I felt I didn't start good.. he then went ahead and started asking questions about the cross country flight that I planned and all the weather resources, weather charts, approach plates, scenarios.... Then he went ahead and briefed me about our flight.
Mr Shelton really gave me a workout in the air, I contacted Hunstville approach to request practice VFR approaches. The ILS at KMDQ was out of service so we were going to do that at KHSV runway 18L with one engine inoperative, then we went direct to RQZ VOR for a VOR-B approach, circle to land runway 18, then tune to the IAF for the GPS runway 18 touch and go, back to intercept the 070 radial from RQZ, do a 10 DME arc to the 044 radial inbound that have to be interrupted because another airplane was flying towards us.. but the arc was pretty good. Then we went back into the radial and he covered my HSI and my Attitude Indicator and we hold on the 8 DME 044 radial with just the clock and magnetic compass. After that we went ahead and did unusual attitudes and by that time I got pretty dizzy. For the end we went ahead and we did a PAR.. he would tell me headings, altitudes, rate of descents and speeds to the threshold of the runway.:my first Cat III landing and it was the smoothest of all 3!! Bottom line.. I passed, I am instrument rated now, I filed my first IFR flight back and we logged some actual instrument. I celebrated last night with my girlfriend and I am ready now for phase 3 on the ATP course!!

Instrument checkride has been scheduled...

I had another instrument flight last thursday. It was my very first flight with my new instructor. I already did some sim work with him and everything it went ok.
This past thursday before our flight, my instructor was very tired. He had been flying all day and helooked kind of he was in a bad mood. He told me that my instrument checkride has been scheduled in Huntsville, AL with Clyde Shelton for Sat, February 17th . I am a little scared now, since I now don't know what to expect and apparently they are going to start using Clyde now for some checkrides since it has been pretty hard to find availability from the DPEs. The bad thing is that my mindset was that I was going to go with Mr. Fred Houston and I am very familiar with the approaches at KWDR and the area around; I already had a lot of information of how he conducts the oral test plus I had my multi engine checkride with him at the beginning of the year, so I already now what to expect on the personality side.
My instructor doesn't have any information about Clyde either.
On the good side.. this will be a great challenge. I am not familiar with the Hunstville, AL area since I've never flown there but I will do my homework and research on the approaches and areas around it. I don't have any more flights scheduled before my checkride; except for the one going up to Huntsville and back. I'll have an intensive sim work tomorrow and monday afternoon. I already finished the King school IFR checkride videos and today I will go through the ASA oral test guide. I am terrified of getting a pink slip here, I can't get it and I won't get it.
My flight for that night wasn't my best, we had to switch airplanes since the red nav light was not working on the one we filed. We did a VOR approach at Toccoa . I lost some situational awareness and busted my MDA on a GPS approach to Gainesville. My ILS back to PDK was flawless.
Keep your fingers crossed.. my next post will be on Saturday night...