FAA Certified Flight Instructor Checkride

Today marked a new day as a pilot. I finally completed a long journey and became a flight instructor. After ten years of flying I finally decided it was time to step up and become more active in aviation. What better way then to teach people the joy of flight and get paid at the same time? It hasn’t been an easy journey though. As many of you know I’ve been staying home at nights, reading, making lesson plans, and planning flights for the next week. I’ve spent the past week on vacation from my job at Intel just to prepare for this thing.

The day was definitely an adventurous one. I got to the airport at 7:30 am to find the aircraft covered in frost. To make matters worse the entire northwest was covered in freezing fog. I spent the next few hours scraping off frost from the aircraft and waiting for the sun to shine. When the sun did shine I flew from Hillsboro to Aurora for my check ride.

My examiner was one hell of a cool guy. His name was Forest Lanning. I’d previously met with him on Christmas Eve to do my oral section of the CFI test. We talked for nearly 6 hours on stuff ranging from flight instructor responsibilities to crazy emergencies you would think could never happen. Forest is one experienced pilot and he had many interesting stories to tell to say the least.

The flight portion of the test went fairly smoothly and I passed without to many problems. While in the air with Forest I had to show him a range of maneuvers including chandelles, eights on pylons, turns around a point, power on stalls, accelerated stalls, steep turns, and a few others I can’t remember.

After receiving my new certificate I flew back to Hillsboro and then celebrated that night downtown with Shin at Henry’s Tavern.