What a great New Year it has been. Starting with New Years Eve all the way until noon today. I can't even begin to describe how awesome the last 3 days have been. And then I busted my check ride today.
I promised you an accurate account of my time doing this and this is part of it. Even from when I started this blog, I had contemplated whether to only share good things but decided it against. This is supposed to be a realistic account of what I am going through. So, I am sharing this. Maybe it's an over-share. Whatever. I'm going to treat this as a coping mechanism. I am not, however, going to turn this into a pity party.
So, where do I begin? I thought everything was going great. I had a little over hour and a half oral exam in which everything seemed to be going great. I went out to preflight the plane when the examiner told me he had to run to a meeting and should be gone less than an hour. So, I sat around. An hour later, we hopped into the plane and started the check ride. We went up and flew two approaches into the main runway at St Pete and then proceeded out to the hold. After one turn in the hold, I requested my last approach, circle to land and then taxi to parking. As I set up for the approach, things seemed to be going well. I tuned into the navigational aid and and was getting ready to line up on the final approach course. As I turned toward the runway, I rechecked my approach plate. Yep, crossing the final approach fix, descend from 1000 feet to 520 then circle to land on the North-South runway. Good.
I loaded the approach into my GPS (which is optional for this approach) for some added situational awareness. It would help me with an appropriate wind correction angle and help me identify the fixes as I flew over them. Ok, 2 miles from the Final Approach Fix. Gear down. Half mile...I'm getting slow so I'm going to add power. Final approach fix, chop the power and descend to 520 feet. As I watched the altimeter needle start to drop, I had this sinking feeling and looked back down at my approach chart. That's when I realized that the fix that I used was not the final approach fix but a random GPS approach fix. I added full power to try to get back to 1000 feet but the damage was done. I was 250 feet below my required altitude and the testing standards say you can be off of your altitude by +100 feet and -0 feet. As I was turning final to line up with the North-South runway, the examiner says, "you know that you can't go below minimums during a check ride." Yeah. I get it. Why not just ask me that question as I'm flaring to land?
So, 2012 started off with a bang and it only took 4 days for things to return to situation normal for me. In the last 6 years of taking "evaluations" I've yet to fail one...until today. I honestly felt like someone had taken the air right out of my lungs. To be honest, I'm super embarrassed because I know I'm a better pilot than that. The rest of the flight was dead on. Until you misinterpret a chart.
I guess I'm just tired of getting my hopes up for great things and then letting myself down in the end. This was no one else's fault but my own. Had I spent the extra 10 seconds to really review the chart instead of getting excited that the check ride was almost over, this would not have happened. Period. 10 seconds. One extra ounch of mental effort and this wouldn't have been me telling myself how awesome I am. Not so much this time.
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