Practice makes … perfect?

Or at least passable I hope. Yes, masochistic me, when asked what she wanted to do next flight, confidently stated that she wanted a full on practice flight test, complete with Cross Country Scenario planning and all. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Now that I have the text confirming our plane booking and have had the conversation as to when I can expect details of that scenario, it seems little less like something I want to willingly inflict on myself.

I’m trying to be sensible and treat this like the real deal. Bob and I briefly discussed a time scale for the big one, the actual thing, last lesson. It seemed eminently sensible at the time, very doable but now, of course, I’m having doubts.

For those of you wondering, I won’t be sharing that time line with you, I’ll explain why in another post. Let’s just say that I have a few opportunities to get some genuine flight test prep in. My plan is to treat pretty much every lesson between now and then as a practice flight test. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll go through the motions enough that it’ll all seem as routine as the trip out to Claremont does now.

As an aside, I admitted to a couple of the instructors who I was chatting to after my last flight that I’m actually getting sick of seeing Claremont and am desperate to go elsewhere!

So now I’m thinking about my upcoming lesson, thinking about what else a flight test entails, apart from the flying. There’s stuff on the ground that I need to think about too, the ground portion, the emergency procedures and so on. I need to make sure that I have the POH with me as I can be asked stuff that I’m not expected to know but I am expected to be able to find fairly quickly. The tyre pressures or something like that. I probably ought to have my licenses arranged in a slightly more presentable way (at the moment they live in a plastic badge holder in the front of my head set case)….. what other paperwork do I need to present to an examiner? Bob gave me a list, I should dig that out of the disaster zone that is my room at the moment. There’s stuff that lives in the plane too, all the registration documents and things. I probably ought to know about those too.

Finally I ought to get my head in the right mindset to do this properly. No half assed messing around. If I want my licence I need to do this and do it right. Last lesson went well because I’d upped my mental game.

I need to carry on doing that and, perhaps, more importantly, I need to make the mental shift from flying with Bob the instructor to flying with Bob the examiner.

That’s going to be tricky I think.