The test was scheduled to start early in the afternoon which meant I had the whole morning to fret and worry. I got plenty of that done and at 1:30 pm met my examiner at the airport. We dealt with the forms and went on to do the oral examination. I have to say I liked his style. He had me plan a flight and kept asking questions and posing what-if scenarios and discussing alternatives. Other questions were sprinkled throughout this session and eventually he declared himself satisfied and went out to the plane.
It took twenty minutes to fuel and prepare the plane and then we were on our way. Soon after takeoff I was under the hood and having a lot of trouble maintaining the assigned altitude, something I had done without a problem for the past several months. With a little help from the autopilot and some deep breaths to overcome the exam nerves, things slowly became smoother.
On our way to Salinas to shoot our approaches we did a few unusual attitude exercises. I actually enjoy those. You close your eyes, the examiner turns the plane this way ant that and then you are supposed to get it back to the straight and level. In some new planes you can do that by just pressing a button, but in my case I had to do it myself. Straightforward, though I could have added power a little bit sooner in one case.
Our first approach was the ILS-31 at Salinas. It is not a bad approach, but it is a long one. You have to go about 15 miles away from the airport before you are able to turn into the approach and it takes almost forever. But at some point we did turn back, tracked the appropriate radio signals and due to the wonders of modern electronics managed to find our way back to the airport. When I removed my hood the runway was in front of us just like it was supposed to be.
This was followed by a missed approach procedure and holding patterns. The wind pushed me a little off track on the first lap, but by the second one things looked much better and we were ready for our next approach, the VOR-13 at Salinas. We told air traffic control about what we wanted to do and they decided we could do it, but not right then. So they kept us flying in circles for a little while but eventually cleared us for the approach.
This approach turned out to be very much fun. It had a procedure turn, something I had not done in over three years, and my examiner wanted me to do it using a partial panel: no attitude indicator, and no directional gyro. So off we went towards the initial approach fix where the controller assumed we were already on final and asked us to change to the tower frequency. We corrected this notion, turned outbound at the fix and did the approach by the book. By the time I took my hood off we were facing runway 13, but circled around and landed on runway 26.
After landing we taxied back to the runway and took off for our last approach of the day, the GPS-31 at Palo Alto. I was confident about this one, as I had done it five days earlier with my instructor. Plus, we were going to use the autopilot for this one and my job would consist mostly of pressing the right buttons and setting the right dials at the right time. Of course, there is electronics and software involved, so you need to remain watchful as there is no guarantee that pressing the right buttons will make the right things happen. But happen rightly it did and when I removed my hood for the last time we were on a straight in approach for Palo Alto airport, where we landed successfully and taxied back to our parking spot.
With the plane tied down and our stuff stowed away we went back to the examiner's office for the final debriefing. He congratulated me on passing, took my nice, shiny pilot certificate and gave me a shoddy handwritten temporary one in exchange. But the shoddy handwritten temporary one says I am an instrument-rated pilot and I love it!
So that was it. I finally finished something that I started four years ago and about which for the last two and half years I have been saying that I only needed another month to finish. I am feeling giddy still, and every time I look up to see an airplane dashing in and out of clouds I think, "I can do that!"
