Tough Checkride Questions

[Princedietrich]

For my PPL checkride, the DPE took out a Cincinnati sectional during the oral and started asking me questions about the various symbols on it. In my youth and nervousness, I never even saw how he was setting me up until the hook was firmly implanted in my lip.

"What kind of airport is this?" he points to a bunch of blue lines.
"Oh, that's a towered airport with a runway longer than 8069 feet"
"Ok, what kind of airport is this?" he points to a little blue dot.
"That's a towered airport with short runways."
"Alright, how about this airport?" he points to a magenta circle
"That's a non-towered airport without a hard surface runway.
"Ok, what about this airport?" he points to a magenta dot.
"that's a non-towered airport with short runways."
"Ok, what kind of airport is this?" and he points to a little gray circle. It was in the mountains of West Virginia and was the same size as the circle for a turf airstrip. No information block nearby. I poured over the map legend and the AIM and every textbook I could get my hands on, and after 5 minutes of sheer panic I gave up.

The DPE just chuckled and told me to look more closely at it.

The gray circle was actually the letter O in the words APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS.

 

[lowtimedriver]

Not the hardest question, but I remember what was, in retrospect, probably the sneakiest ploy the examiner used to try to trip me up. This was for my PPL checkride. One thing my instructor had tried to get me to guard against was distractions: "Wow, look at all those police cars down there, there must be something happening," my instructor would say. He was trying to get me to look out the side window, to divert my attention from Flying The Airplane.

The examiner hit me with the same test, but he was much more subtle. We're heading back to the airport (also PWK, by the way) having pretty much completed what had been (so far) a successful ride. He starts fiddling with one of the instruments. "I wonder how we get this to work?" he asks with genuine curiosity. I look, and feel a slight surge of panic, because here's a LORAN unit in the cockpit that I'd somehow never even noticed before.

We both look at it for a few seconds-- do we push this button? that one?-- and I'm wondering how I could have spent so many hours in a cockpit and never even seen this thing before. And now I've got an examiner asking me questions about it! What do I do? Some reflex kicked in, and I said "Well, I'll have to look at that once we're on the ground." But it wasn't until several seconds later that I realized he'd been deliberately trying to distract me.

It was a good trick on his part, because it really got my general checkride nervousness to work against me. If my innate desire to Always Fly The Airplane hadn't been quite as strong, I would have locked onto this red herring that I thought was important. Darn good DPE. And darn sneaky.

I am getting close to doing my checkride and on a recent flight my CFI on short final said to me, "There is a SWAT team outside a house at 3:00 O'clock." I didn't even flinch and just gave him my best Borat impression, "That's very nice..". They are going to have to get more creative than that. Now if he would of said, "hey, look at that naked chick", I would have been in trouble.