The Big Day, Part 1

I arrived a bit early, so I sat in the car and called up WX-BRIEF to get a full weather briefing. Since we weren't actually going to make the flight, it was mostly academic, but you have to do it to be able to explain why we would or would not make the flight.

When the time came, I hopped over to the flight school, where the examiner was just finishing with the prior student. I took a few minutes to plug in the weight and balance calculations (after realizing that I didn't have the actual airplane weight on hand last night). But I didn't even have time to put in the wind corrections to my navigation log; it was time to get started.

The oral portion of the exam covered a wide range of information, but we spent (what seemed to me) to be a lot of time on chart interpretation, airspace, and cross-country scenarios. Luckily, this is an area that I am very comfortable with. We ran through general questions about carrying passengers, what it took to be legal from private pilot, airplane, weather, and physiological perspectives, and talked about various obscure regulations and their interpretations.

I didn't have 100% of the answers, but that's expected. I at least knew when I was on the ragged edge of my knowledge, but we only looked up one thing in the regulations. Most of the time, it was a small detail, and the examiner could tell that I had the general ideas.

Before I knew it, it was time to fly.

We went down to preflight, and the examiner said, "Pretend I'm a regular passenger wondering what it is you're doing. Explain it to me." So that's what I did. Every single item, as if I was giving a ride to a friend who knew nothing about airplanes. I felt like I was performing for someone who had seen this show hundreds of times and knew exactly how it would end. I even felt like I was talking too much. In fact, my effort to do so made me overlook an area of the checklist, but since it's all habit now, it didn't take long to catch it.

Then we got in the plane and I explained what we would do, the steps I would go through, cockpit radio traffic, emergency procedures, seat belts...the works. During the debrief, the examiner pointed out one thing I didn't mention: the ELT. Well, shoot...there's always something.

We started up and got going, with more questions about airport signs, lights, procedures, and other field-related topics. We got to the runup, and I again explained what we were going to do and why. Then, my heart sank.

The runup involves throttling up to 1700 RPM and checking the magnetos, engine instruments, and flight instruments (especially the vacuum powered ones). As I pushed the throttle in, the RPM was nowhere near steady. There are always some very minor fluctuations - maybe 10 or 20 RPM, but this was +/- 75 RPM without doing anything. It wasn't even clear that we were getting a good magneto check. I sat there flipping the key back and forth, cycling the fuel pump, and generally staring at the tachometer - willing it to just stop waving back and forth. What are we going to do? Cancel the flight? Get another plane? Ack.

The examiner obviously knew I was having a mental breakdown at this point, and figured it might be fouled plugs. He brought the mixture out, which didn't seem to fix it. Then we ran it all the way up to 2000 RPM, but that didn't seem to have any effect either. These planes run at full rich in some very high, hot conditions, so I would have been surprised if it really was too rich on this cold day. We sat there for another minute with the engine up to 1700, back to idle, up to 2000, back to idle. All the other gauges were in the green, and there weren't any funny noises, so, we jointly decided to press on and watch what happened on the runway.

Needless to say, there wasn't a fiery crash....