Professional Pilot Career Journal
October 30, 2006 – 72 hours of Hell maketh a captain
My training is complete, and
when I return to
I had stated in my last
career journal entry that on the checkride there is absolutely no room for
error. Last Monday, I found that out the
hard way. For the first time in my life,
I failed a checkride.
I honestly didn’t know I had
been unsuccessful until after the checkride was over and the examiner was
debriefing me. It never even occurred to
me that failing was a possibility, given my success in my previous 12
checkrides, even though I knew the examiner assigned to me was probably the
strictest in the company. My reason for
failure was that I flew one of my approaches too fast at 9 knots over the
required speed of 132 knots. The FAA
standards for passing the checkride require me to be within 5 knots of the
required speed, since flying faster than this results in landing further down
the runway than is desired. Hence, the
additional 4 knots killed me, despite the fact that my landing would have been
safely completed in the designated touchdown zone and the airplane stopped with
thousands of feet of runway to spare. I
was given the infamous FAA “pink slip” and scheduled for one additional
training session two days later, followed by another checkride on the next day. My training partner also failed his
checkride, almost for the exact same reason.
A checkride consists of at
least four approaches, takeoffs, maneuvering, responses to emergency items, and
about a hundred other things that required your immediate attention as a
pilot. I’m not at all wishing to sound
like a person who whines or complains when things don’t go my way, but some
examiners would probably haven taken into account the bigger picture of the entire
checkride, which I flew quite well, and maybe let the extra 9 knots go,
choosing to debrief it at the end rather than fail the student. However, I do not blame the examiner for
sticking to the standards – he was doing his job. I am however bothered by the fact that upon
later reflection that I was flying this particular type of approach too fast
all during my training and nobody ever told me about it. Our training department is one of the best in
the airline industry and extremely thorough in its preparation of new first
officers and captains, but in this case had my technique been corrected just
one time during any of the 4 training sessions prior to my checkride, I would
never have failed the checkride in the first place. Granted, this is a sign of
a good training department where an examiner and instructor combine to fix
any mistakes and send safe pilots out to the line. Unfortunately, if the examiner
is the one doing the fixing, it is the student that pays for it in the end
with the mark of a failed checkride on his record. When I did my re-training session afterwards
with a new instructor, I flew 8 approaches, and was within 2 knots of my target
airspeed every single time. On my second
checkride, I passed with no problem.
I can confidently say that
the 72 hours between my first and second checkride was absolute hell, some of
the worst days of the last few years for me.
I know that sounds a little extreme, but I am simply not accustomed to
failing at anything, particularly a checkride.
For the first half of that three-day period I couldn’t do anything but
sit in my crashpad and worry about the whole thing. The company does not take lightly a second
failure so I was terrified of what would happen if I blew the second ride. I couldn’t even get back in the simulator for
two days to at least prove to myself that I did indeed know how to fly an
airplane. I slept very little, ate
little, and was only able to talk to my wife by phone. For her, going through the whole thing was
just as hard as it was for me because from 1500 miles away there was even less
she could do during the interim 72 hours than I could. After the retraining session, which was
completed 14 hours prior to my second checkride, I did feel a little better because
I knew if I flew anywhere near as well on the checkride as I did that day I
would have no problem. But I still was
unable to sleep most of the night before the second checkride.
However, I got right in
there the next morning, flew great and effectively erased the previous 72
hours. But I am seeing several new gray
hairs that I didn’t have before. I have
since found out a fairly large percentage of new captains fail their first
checkride, but that doesn’t really make me feel too much better given I have
beaten much worse odds than that when it comes to flying.
In any case, I am putting
this all in the rear-view mirror. The
fact is, because of the retraining, I am a safer and more accurate pilot than
before which is obviously a positive result of this experience. I am enjoying my days off now and will begin
a three-day trip on Wednesday with an instructor in the right seat to
transition me to line flying. The most
challenging part will probably be taxiing since I haven’t driven an airplane on
the ground in several years, and never one that is nearly 100 feet long. Most of my trip will be in and out of our hub
in
I’ll talk all about my first
trip in my next update. It should be an
eye-opening experience!