Instument Checkride – Oral

Well – today was the big day. Got up at 5:30am (for a 9:00am checkride) because I couldn’t sleep. Got a weather briefing, finished the flight planning to Monterey, loaded up, and went to breakfast. Studied for the oral while eating, and then the time had come.

Showed up at Mark’s office about 10 minutes early, and ran into a friend who was just coming from an instrument ground school in the same building. Chatted for a few, then headed in. Mark was very cool as usual, put me at ease immediately. After reviewing the forms, getting ID, etc, we started right in on the oral.

Right out of the gate there were all kinds of non-instrument questions – airworthiness, required documents, etc. Then he started to spin off into inspections for IFR flight, IFR equipment, etc. A lot of that stuff. Then immediately to weather. This was the part that concerned me, but it turns out I knew it even better than I thought. We went through metars and tafs, various charts (not actually showing them to me and asking me to decipher them, but asking which would be most useful), questions on thunderstorms, and fronts.

Then on to flight planning. We reviewed my chosen route to Monterey, including detailed review of the departure procedure, altitudes, lost comms, copying a clearance, and various fixes. We reviewed just about everything on the enroute charts, including airspace, altitudes to fly, airports, special use airspace, etc.

After that it was performance (including v-speeds, which I didn’t know very well), weight and balance, takeoff and landing roll, and instrument failures. That was about it – I’d passed the oral.

We checked the weather, and ironically it wasn’t good enough to do the practical. We rescheduled for next week, and we’ll keep an eye on the weather. Almost there!