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!!