Another day another checkride! This marks checkride number 3 for me in the last months (Commercial Multi addon, CFI-Initial, CFI-Instrument.)
I will say the training/prep for this checkride/rating was rather anti-climactic. After I took my CFI-Initial checkride a few weeks ago I knew I wanted to get this one done ASAP so I could have them both done before I started actually working, as I figured my first 100 hours or so of instructing I probably wouldn't want to have the added workload of getting ready for another checkride.
I used the same examiner for this checkride as I did for my initial ride just a few weeks before, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.
I did quite a bit of self study at home over the holidays which was really just reading back through all my materials from my instrument rating. I read back through my ASA Instrument Rating Oral Exam Guide and the IFR Know It All Guide to help refresh myself on all the ins and outs that had slipped my mind. Will Liebhaber also has a great YouTube Channel with a lot of IFR chart videos.
On the flying side of things I did 3 flights in preparation for the checkride. This consisted of shooting different approaches that I hadn't flown in a while, but mainly learning the G1000 system. All my training and flying up to this point for the most part has been on a 6-pack and a G430 stack if I'm lucky. I felt comfortable with flying the actual approaches, but wanted to have a good grasp on programming G1000, bouncing between approaches, working with the autopilot etc before I took my checkride. I could have used a plane with a 6-pack for the ride but decided that since I'll also be teaching in planes that have a G1000 it would be a good time to go ahead and learn the system.
The day before my checkride I had filled out my application on IACRA and my instructor was going to sign it but the system wouldn't let him because he had just gotten his CFI-I a few weeks prior and the system hadn't processed it yet. Paper 8710 it is. Lovely.
After a minor hiccough with the plane the morning of the checkride, I arrived in Cincinnati 9:30am. We had to do everything by hand since I was using a paper 8710 so that added a few minutes to the admin side of things. We finally began the oral exam around 10:00am.
The first thing we talked about was procedure turns and holds in lieu of procedure turns. They were fairly basic questions such as when can you descend in the hold, in the procedure turn, what ATC reports are required in a hold, when do you have to do a procedure turn, etc. There were a couple gotcha questions, but those were more of a discussion rather than just getting grilled. We also talked a little about teaching instruments and teaching good instrument scans and cross checks. The biggest chunk of the oral exam was spent talking about procedure turns, and that the FAA doesn't dictate exactly how you should fly them, as long as you're within the protected sector.
For instance, in the section of the approach above, if you are inbound from the south-east on the approach and are doing the full procedure turn, there's nothing that says you have to cross the VOR, turn, intercept the 135 radial outbound, turn to 180* and back to 360* before intercepting and heading back inbound. Evidently a lot of instructors teach it that way. In this case, if we're approaching the VOR from the south east like I depicted with the red plane, it would probably be easiest just to cross the VOR, turn left, and fly it as a hold with non-standard turns before heading back inbound, essentially how it's depicted for the hold on the missed procedure.
The flight portion was pretty straightforward. We had planned out a flight with 3 instrument approaches at surrounding airports based on what runways we thought they would be using. When we got out the the plane we realized that in the hour we were inside the winds had completely shifted and none of the approaches we had planned would work! We called an audible and devised a new plane in the plane before we fired it up.
We departed from I69 and headed south towards a class G airport about 25 miles south. I set up for a VOR-B approach with an outbound procedure turn and circle to land. I took the foggles off about 200' above minimums and circled in. We opted to do a low approach since it was a short runway and we probably would have had to taxi back if we touched down. On departure I threw the foggles back on and we set up for the RNAV runway 4 approach back into I69. Nothing special here, but we didn't "break out of the clouds" this time so we went missed at the missed approach point. The missed procedure for this approach is to climb straight out to 2,600 and hold at a fix 12 miles off the end of the runway. Conveniently enough, the holding fix on the missed approach for the RNAV runway 4 is the same fix that's the initial approach for the RNAV runway 22. As we were heading to the fix on the missed approach I loaded the RNAV 22, continued to the fix and we did the procedure turn there and headed back in. Because the winds were favoring runway 4 we used the circling minimums and circled back around to runway 4 and called it a day. 1.2 on the Hobbs and a new temporary certificate in hand!