Ticket renewed... what a day..

After a good hour of grueling interrogation on aircraft systems, company procedures and air regulations, I finally stepped into the aircraft.

Myself and another pilot were going to both be tested at the same time on a new procedure our company has recently been approved for (GPS approaches to airports). The examiner (a company pilot) would be in the back of the plane observing and telling us what to do for the testing. The plan was to go and have the other pilot do his flight test up in Red Deer, AB (20 min flight north of Calgary). After that we would land in Red Deer and I would then become the pilot flying and do the same procedures for the GPS approaches, and then I would continue with the rest of my recurrency training at the Red Deer airport and then transitioning back to Calgary.

Well holy hell. Bumpy as shit, bad weather in the area and a very busy airspace everywhere we went. It all amounted to a very stressful couple of hours, we were really sweated out during the testing, during my section especially because it was my yearly retraining. Imagine every possible thing that could go wrong on a flight, roll it all into one, and you've pretty much got what I went through. Multiple systems failures while attempting to execute tricky approaches to airports without the ability to look outside until the last couple of hundred feet.

In one scenario we attempted an approach to the Red Deer airport but upon reaching the lowest safe altitude the approach goes to (318 ft above the airport elevation) the examiner told us we had no visual contact and so we initiated a missed approach procedure. Simple enough procedure, where we abort the approach and climb away from the airport and go to a fix to either try again or head off to another airport. Well, as I was climbing away from the airport, the examiner reached forward and pulled the throttles back to idle and informed me that I just had a complete engine failure. Training kicks in and I cranked the aircraft back towards the airport while at the same time running through the emergency memorized checklist to properly set the aircraft up for an emergency landing with no engine. It was great to see that it all worked out as I was able to maneuver the aircraft back to the reciprocal runway at the airport successfully.

After finishing at Red Deer we head back to Calgary dodging growing thunderstorms and showers in the area, we were being vectored all around by the air traffic controllers because of a crazy amount of air traffic around Calgary. Then on the approach into Calgary I had all of my navigational systems failed on me except the very bare assed minimums to complete the approach.. a stressful event for sure. However, I must say, my landing back in Calgary was one of my best!

In any event, the flight test was over and we went back for a debriefing.

The end result (if you hadn't already figured it out by the title of this blog entry) is that I passed.

-GPS approach certification PASSED
-Company/Aircraft yearly certification PASSED
-Bi-Annual Instrument rating RENEWED (this was an added bonus, a very costly thing to get done on one's own.. we did enough training and flight testing that the examiner was able to also renew this... woo hoo!)

So.. there you have it... safe to fly the skies again. Legally that is... always safe... ;)

Now I'm absolutely exhausted... off to bed for me!