Flight Test

Flight tests are a bit of a strange exercise in pilot psychology; As pilots we will spend countless hours mastering the art of flying an aircraft, perpetually sharpening the skills we will use on every flight, and skills we may only use once during an entire career to the point where we would be able to manage most any eventuality which could occur while flying. Despite all of this preparation, flight tests, at least for myself, remain a source of apprehension. While sitting at the flight school where I took my private pilot license, I overheard a student ask one of the instructors what he though of pilots who got nervous before a flight test to which the instructor responded that if he knew on a given flight he would be faced with short field takeoff followed by a stall, a diversion due to weather and finally concluding with an engine failure, he would be nervous too. Flight tests typically consist of a little more than a dozen or so flight exercises that will require the pilot to use a broad spectrum of skills in order to pass. Our performance is graded on how closely we can maintain parameters of altitude, airspeed and heading, among others. To a certain degree, my own flight test apprehension, has been not so much a product of the exercises themselves, but rather of the unknowns. Even while you can know a given exercise inside and out, the behaviour of weather, of particular aircraft and of examiners will only be found out at the time of the test itself.

At one point in time, it was steep turns that was cause for a sleepless night before a flight test. I saw the steep turn as one of the few exercises where my performance, during the minute the exercise would take to complete, would determine whether I passed or failed. One slip beyond 100 feet, or 10 knots or 10 degrees of heading and it would all be over.

Knowing that I had not gone outside of flight test standards since my first steep turns did little to quell the fear that the possibility existed that it may happen on a flight test. While there were other exercises which would be challenging, the success of most other items on the flight test would not come down to my performance during a few key minutes, but rather my performance during the entire exercise itself. With time I became comfortable enough with steep turns that, even when considering the unknowns of a flight test, they were no longer a cause for worry.

I read once that one of the many marks of a good pilot is the ability to keep a level head and exercise sound judgement, regardless of how sweaty their hands, or how tight their grip on the controls got. Some would argue that flight tests are good preparation for dealing with the stressful situations with which pilots can sometimes be faced in the real world outside of training.

Unfortunately with flying as with life outside of flying, intellectual knowledge of what causes apprehension does not always go very far towards eliminating it. A fact that I am revisiting again on the evening prior to the flight for the upgrade to captain. After having studied emergency procedures and performance charts, airspeeds and operating procedures, I lay in bed wondering if there wasn't some i I had left undotted, a t left uncrossed. Eventually after some period of reciting engine failure drills in my head, sleep finally overcame me early enough in the night to allow for a decent sleep. In the morning I awoke early to check the weather and prepare a bit of breakfast before heading in to the hangar. Even while the evening prior had me reviewing anything that could be of use for the flight test, today I put that aside; now was not the time for studying.

I arrived at the hangar a half an hour early to get the plane set up for the ride. After talking with the examiner about our route and where we would conduct the upper airwork, I looked at the weather once again to see if anything had changed, typed up and filed our flight plan, and figured out the performance numbers I would soon be asked for. From here the test followed a fairly routine pattern; Aircraft systems and IFR procedures questions, hypothetical situations followed by a briefing of the flight test itself and what would be expected of us as a crew. Once in the plane, it simply became a matter of doing what I had been doing since learning to fly a number of years ago, flying the airplane.

Touching down after the last approach of the flight test, I felt a simultaneous rush of relief, pride and fatigue. I taxied the plane in to the hangar, careful not to let the flood of emotions get in the way of the task at hand; I was not finished yet. Setting the park brake in front of the hangar, I paused for a second before bringing the condition levers back, shutting down the engines. As the engines spooled down I felt a hand on my shoulder, "Congratulations, gather your things and I'll meet you two inside". I sat there, for a few minutes after the pilot who had been flying right seat and the examiner deplaned, alone in the cockpit, trying to take everything that had transpired in the past 5 hours. All that had come before it, the months of preparation, the studying, the reading, the worry, everything leading up to this moment, in an instant, all worthwhile.

"I owned the world that hour as I rode over it. Free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them." Charles Lindbergh