Bob and I are both taking this practice flight test seriously.
Rather than using the dreaded index cards of doom, he’s got a printed sheet
with all the exercises on it, complete with tolerances and he’s marking me,
with comments, as an examiner would.
The ground debrief consisted
of him running through these exercises and grading me on the 1-4 scale and
sharing his comments.
Everything you do is judged, right from the point you get in the
plane. Your checklist use, your safety in even starting the damn thing and how
you manoeuvre around the airport before carrying out your run up checks and
calling “ready for takeoff”
Everything before the takeoff a “4”. Bob highly complementary, but I’m tired and a
little wrung out. In an attempt to break the high intensity of the lesson and
debrief, I can’t help but laugh “Yeah Bob, basically I passed at ‘not leaving
the ground.’ Thanks but I kind of think I already knew how to do that!”
We both had a bit of a chuckle over that before getting on with the
serious matter of debriefing the actual flight.
I made light of the situation but secretly I’m a little pleased. I
was on 08 today, which is not my runway of choice, complicated by the fact that
the winds were light and the ATIS was calling 26 the active. I hedged my bets,
merely requesting taxi instructions to “the active” when I had a suspicion that
they’d switched, keeping an ear on the instructions other planes were getting
while doing my preflight checks.
Yet again, I was so focussed on the technique that I didn’t have
any room for negative emotions.
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