Last Sunday morning I was scheduled for my PPL flight test. I was given the following route on Friday so I could prepare a flight plan with all the appropriate bells and whistles:
London to Pelee Island, Pelee Island to Wiarton. For weight and balance purposes: me (170lbs) plus Mr. Examiner (210lbs) plus an imaginary standard male in the back seat along with 60lbs of equally imaginary cargo.
I don’t have classes on Fridays which is nice because I got to spend the whole day at my kitchen table – my map sprawled out in front of me and rulers at the ready. Given the 646lbs of people and cargo we’d be carrying, I knew that I wouldn’t be making this trip without stopping somewhere for gas. Also, Pelee island is… an island, and quite understandably, doesn’t have fuel services.
So, as you can see, problem #1 was finding where I should stop for fuel. Problem #2 quickly presented itself: what is the empty weight of the aircraft? I called my flight school to find out, because without that information, I wouldn’t know how much fuel I could carry, and thus wouldn’t know how far I could get before I needed to stop for fuel. Problem #3: no one answered the phone. Uh oh. Panic.
Turns out that when the weather is bad and no one is flying, people go home early, so no one was there to answer my desperate calls. My instructor told me the weight was around 1527lbs, so I went with that.
After doing fuel and weight calculations, I figured I could make it to Pelee, then take off again and land at Leamington, which is only 16NM away. With all the legal fuel reserves, I barely had enough. In Leamington, fill the tanks to 21gals and off to Wiarton via Walkerton, then follow the 189º YVV radial into Wiarton.
So I drew my 10º drift lines, drew on my 10NM markers, highlighted my route, and recorded distances, tracks and magnetic variation. The next morning, I woke up and finished off my flight plan using upper winds data and pressure settings. Finally done planning. Time to start getting nervous.
Turns out the weather was just horrible: blowing snow, visibility below VFR minimums and crosswinds exceeding the max allowed in the C172 POH. So it looked like I would only get to do the ground portion of the flight test where you sit in a little room with the examiner and he/she quizzes you on everything to do with your route.
The next hour and a half went by with few problems. I was asked to explain my route, why I chose certain altitudes and power settings, amongst other trivial items. I had to travel over water to get to Pelee so I professionally pulled out my POH and explained that at 4,500′ I could glide at least 6 miles. With the distance between land 10 miles, I was legally safe to fly at this altitude, but I explained that I would probably climb to put a buffer between “legal” and “safe”. Pretty sure I got bonus points for saying that.
Next I was quizzed on some weather terminology including coded METAR terms. I was asked what “REBLSN” meant. I knew BLSN was “blowing snow”, but I had never seen it with an RE in front of it. I looked into From The Ground Up but found no reference to the RE. I made my best guess of Regional, but I was wrong. Oh well. I was told after that it meant “recent blowing snow”. I got the snow part right.
We went through the documents for the airplane including required docs to carry on board, inspection requirements for the airplane, etc. For some reason I blanked and forgot about the POH and said ownership instead. I was then asked if the POH was required and I felt like an idiot. I was definitely just given a break and quickly said POH instead of ownership. D’oh.
Next came aircraft systems. You get two systems to explain in detail and I was given fuel system and vacuum system. If you’ve read my blog before, you’ll know that I had a running series called “Learn A System” with the intended purpose of teaching myself these systems. Turns out fuel system was one of them. Hah! I aced it without even having to look at my POH, but flipped to the section on the vacuum system and explained how it worked. No problems here.
I’m fairly certain that this was all I was asked except for one last thing. Turns out the airplane we were going to fly in is a C172-P and the POH I own is for a C172-N. I overlooked this fact completely and just assumed I had the same POH as the airplane we were flying. Having only a dozen or so flights in the 172, it never occurred to me that they would be different. I was asked that if we were really flying today, would we be carrying all of the correct documents, or were we just using these documents for the purposes of the ground portion quiz. I thought to myself, “There’s something he’s figured out and I better say this was just for the ground portion”. Lucky me. If I had said the docs were good to go flying with, I would have failed. Yikes!
So I passed the ground portion no problem with all 3′s and 4′s. The marking system is a 4-point system with 4 being perfect, 3 being good, 2 being satisfactory and 1 being a fail basically. Good to know I was at least “good” at the theory portion of aviation.
I’ll be posting part two when I complete the flight portion of my test and will hopefully be a licensed private pilot! Wish me luck.
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