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FAA Private Pilot, Single Engine Land Checkride Experience.
May 2012
This post describes my experiences, to the extent that I can remember them, during my FAA Private Pilot check ride. The whole process was much less stressful than I had anticipated. I think you’ll find that as long as you are prepared, you will quite enjoy it.
My DPE was very friendly and reasonable. She is definitely there to do the job entrusted to her by the FAA, but she is not at all difficult or intimidating during this process. As expected I found interviewing and flying with her to be easier and less rigorous than it was during my mock check ride.
The day started by her reviewing my log book to ensure that overall hours minimums and specific requirements (Long solo XC, etc) were met. She then reviewed my 8710 form, photo ID, etc to ensure all was in order before we began. Once satisfied that all the requirements were met, she accepted my payment of $400 and the test began. She mentioned we can pause the test at any time if we need a break for water, bathroom, etc.
She made sure to tell me to answer all questions from the point of view of a Private Pilot, not a student pilot. This seems obvious, but after several months of learning the rules of a student pilot’s license, this may be a helpful reminder.
As I will detail in other posts, I have begun the training process to obtain my Private Pilot’s License, at a flight school here in Seattle. The training process consists of ground school (classroom time), independent study (reading, watching educational videos, etc), and flight time in a Cessna 172P with my Certificated Flight Instructor.
Thus far, I have been having a blast with the training process. I’ve been looking forward to my three weekly classroom sessions, and really looking forward to the time I get to spend piloting the plane. I’ve been fortunate to this point, and I have been able to take a few hours each week off of work in the middle of the day to hop down to Boeing Field, 4 miles south of Downtown where I work, and get my flight time in. There is just one problem. It is mid November.. in Seattle. The hours of daylight are getting shorter by the day, and the weather is getting worse and worse. As we move into December and January, I’ll have less and less opportunity to get regular flight time in, so naturally I’ve been looking for other ways to supplement the time in the plane with another experience that can be beneficial to a student pilot, the flight simulator.
A Real Cessna 172P
While I’ve had a computer setup to run Microsoft Flight Simulator in the past, I had never experienced the potential that it has as a training tool for someone learning to fly until now. While there are a lot of factors involved in flying a real airplane that do not translate well to the simulator (e.g. control feedback, spatial orientation, etc) its advantages are many. After a real world flight with my instructor, I can come back to the simulator and recreate the scenario I had just flown with remarkable detail, and repeat the lesson.
The panel of a virtual Cessna 172P in FSX
With that in mind, I decided to build a dedicated ‘gaming’ machine for the purposes of running Microsoft Flight Simulator X, and/or X-Plane. I put in hours of research to familiarize myself with the latest and greatest hardware options (I’m an IT professional, but had long since lost touch with the hardware that the kids are using these days for gaming.) More importantly I researched the specific hardware components that the most experienced and passionate flight simulator users are using on their machines at home. As with all technology hardware, you often get what you pay for, but there are almost always points of diminishing return that are reached when dealing with the latest and greatest. With that in mind, I have put together the following components, which achieve extremely high FSX benchmark results*, while maintaining a relatively reasonable price point.
Grand total: $1912 for a machine that will handle just about any high end graphics intensive game you throw at it. For my purposes, this will allow me to run Microsoft Flight Simulator with very high graphics settings, along with a number of third party addons toachieve greater visual and functional realism.
* For details about FSX Benchmarks, and to see real world results, click here.
