Pink slip, passed, and moving on...

Well unfortunately I officially failed my first checkride, the oral portion of my Multi-engine Instructor Initial checkride. I felt pretty comfortable up to the day previous my checkride when ATP informed me that I was going to take the checkride with a FAA examiner instead of the examiner I originally was supposed to go with. I was very hesitant to go through with it, but I studied all that day and prepared myself the best I could. It was a rough 4 hours the next morning. I knew the information sufficiently, but explaining it proved difficult and the examiner thought it would be necessary for me to get more training. I was pretty disappointed, both in the circumstances of my examiner being switched the day before, and also in myself for not being prepared or confident to perform adequately. I learned a lot from the experience and now looking back at it, I'm not as disappointed.

I returned home from Las Vegas that day and I was going to have to wait a couple of weeks until the examiner returned from a trip. Fortunately, ATP was able to schedule a different examiner for me and I returned to Las Vegas the next week. This checkride had it's moments as well.

Luckily the examiner just had me do the portion of the oral that I had failed on instead of requiring me to retake the entire portion. I felt a lot more confident and I passed the oral portion, not without some minor mistakes though. Then to the flying. We went out the plane and I was pretty nervous due to the fact that I hadn't been in the Seminole for two weeks. I made some stupid mistakes but luckily we took off and began to fly around the pattern. I immediately noticed that I wasn't able to maintain the proper climb airspeed as we were climbing to pattern altitude and I commented to the examiner about it. He continued with exam (pretending to be a private pilot student) and as we finally were able to reach pattern altitude, he failed one of the engines for me to teach and make a single engine approach to landing. When we fly on one engine we maintain an airspeed that will provide us the best performance, but I couldn't maintain this airspeed with a significant descent. He noticed the problem as well and decided to give me back the failed engine and I made a normal landing with both engines. He kept asking me what I thought the problem was but my mind was racing and I just made the decision to go back and park the plane.

According to the engine gauges, both engines were performing within their normal ranges and maximum performance, but we weren't seeing it. On final, him and I noticed the airspeed jump about 30 knots and he had mentally figured out the problem, when I was making sure I didn't mess anything else up. When we returned to the office, I thought he was going to fail me because he didn't seem happy and I thought I wasn't flying my best. We finally discussed what happened and we figured out (mostly he did) that there was something wrong with our pitot/static system which tells us our airspeed and it was giving us erroneous indications. So even though we were trying to maintain 88 knots to climb, we were really flying at about 120 knots, and not maintaining a proper climb. I learned a lot from this experience and wished I would have troubleshooted the problem accordingly, but I do give myself credit due to the fact that it was a checkride and I was under a huge amount of stress as it was, and I made a good decision not to continue with the flight. What bad luck to have on a checkride.

We then waited for another plane and we went up and I was able to perform without major faults. I felt very good about my ability during the second flight and he passed me. Overall, that day was one of the most stressful and both mentally and physically draining day I've ever had. We started at 10:00a and didn't get done until 5:00p. I was unbelievably relieved and happy for passing and I drove back home a lot happier than the week previous. I am now an instructor.