Check Ride Failure

If he has an amazing record after school, then maybe.

Right now, it's a buyers market. The airlines get to choose who they pick, and it makes sense for them to pick people who haven't failed checkrides over those who have. Sorry, but that's how it is. Regardless of what checkride failures actually say about a pilot, the public sees checkride failures as a sign of a crappy pilot.

When there's less people to choose from, they'll start hiring guys with more failures.
Residency is not taking written tests, it's hands on. Someone who struggles in residency will probably not be the best doctor. My wife has seen some graduate who she would not let touch our kids.
 
Residency is not taking written tests, it's hands on. Someone who struggles in residency will probably not be the best doctor. My wife has seen some graduate who she would not let touch our kids.

Yet they are still doctors. the fact that they had a little bit of a hard time during their training did not inhibit them from doing what they wanted to do. And I bet that with the experience they pick up along the way, they will become much better doctors in the future when they get some experience. But they are not doomed for having a tough time during training.
 
Actually, as per the FAA approved 141 syllabus, the check ride is just the final lesson in that phase of training. A failed ride is no different than having an unsatisfactory lesson. You must go back up with your/another instructor for a remedial flight, or ground review if applicable, and get signed off again to re-take the failed lesson. It only counts as a failed lesson.

Do you actually believe what you just said? I really do hope you are not a check instructor at a 141 program. According to you a In-House EOC check-ride for a certificate is just another LESSON. Did you even read what you wrote ?
 
How would you have any idea? It's not like they have annual exams and publish the results.

Malpractice suits are a matter of public record, and there are many doctor rating services and doctor rating sites on the internet. A simple google search can sometimes turn up information.
 
Yet they are still doctors. the fact that they had a little bit of a hard time during their training did not inhibit them from doing what they wanted to do. And I bet that with the experience they pick up along the way, they will become much better doctors in the future when they get some experience. But they are not doomed for having a tough time during training.

unless their malpractice insurance is through the roof...they may be doctors, just like pilots are pilots - but given the choice, as a hospital administrator to hire a doctor with no claims against them and one with 3, which one are you going to choose? It's all about the ben-ja-mans.
 
Yet they are still doctors. the fact that they had a little bit of a hard time during their training did not inhibit them from doing what they wanted to do. And I bet that with the experience they pick up along the way, they will become much better doctors in the future when they get some experience. But they are not doomed for having a tough time during training.

You're kidding, right? Fail enough of residency and you are still a doctor but good luck. Washing out of residency is normally not good for ones medical career.
Also, do you want to be the person a doctor is using to pick up experience "...along the way"??? You go right ahead. I'll send my kids to someone who did well in residency.
OP recently failed an ATP ride along with his other failures. He may be a very good pilot... I don't know. But I don't want to find out while he's flying my kids.
 
All I am saying is that it is not fair to seal the fate of ones career with the difficulties they faced in the first portion of their exposure to the field. As it has been said above, if all the checkrides were uniform, then it is a different story. But the variance of the standards from examiner to examiner are, well....not at all small to say the least. I know people who busted on orals because the DPE didn't like how things were phrased. The quality of the pilot 2,500 hrs after a failure should not be included in part of an evaluation process. Many things were learned and the ability of the pilot has most defiantly changed for the better since a failure at 150 hrs or so.
 
Do you actually believe what you just said? I really do hope you are not a check instructor at a 141 program. According to you a In-House EOC check-ride for a certificate is just another LESSON. Did you even read what you wrote ?

?

That is how they go. It is just a lesson in the TCO that in order to be completed and a certificate awarded, be passed to the PTS standards by a check/assistant chief instructor. If the student fails this checkride/lesson, they don't get a pink slip, or even have to be re-endorsed. Just scheduled again once their instructor gives them more training and feels that they are ready again.
 
?

That is how they go. It is just a lesson in the TCO that in order to be completed and a certificate awarded, be passed to the PTS standards by a check/assistant chief instructor. If the student fails this checkride/lesson, they don't get a pink slip, or even have to be re-endorsed. Just scheduled again once their instructor gives them more training and feels that they are ready again.

True, but if the Instructors/Chief Instructors are filling out logbooks correct then it wouldn't take someone in the hiring process long to find failed 141 checks.

I personally think checkrides are WAY to subjective to have any kind of gauge on the strength of the applicant.
 
I personally think checkrides are WAY to subjective to have any kind of gauge on the strength of the applicant.

Do you have a better idea?

I'm an instructor in a military pilot training program that has hundreds of students go through annually, and the reality is that checkride performance does typically correspond with overall ability. Are there some good pilots who choke on checkrides? Yes. Are there poor pilots who perform well on checkrides? Yes, that happens too. These cases are outliers, though, and the standard bell-curve usually applies.

This is in a system that grades pilot performances on many dimensions -- individual maneuvers during 'daily' training flights, individual maneuvers during checkrides, classroom academic performance, general knowledge quiz performance, and a couple other areas not directly connected with flying and having to do with personal motivation, leadership, interaction with classmates and instructors, etc.

Given all of these dimensions which pilots are graded, checkride scores are weighted the most heavily, and do closely correspond to the students' performance in other areas.

Seems to me that the one area where civil checkrides might differ from military training checkrides is the close standardization of the evaluators. Naturally, the FAA publishes the PTS (and the USAF has the same thing, called "Course Training Standards"), but it's the examiner's judgment of student performance against those standards where there can be deviation. The USAF goes to great lengths to make sure that grading is standard. I haven't personally seen significant deviation between FAA examiners that I've taken checkrides with, but I've also never taken multiple iterations of the same checkride with different DEs.
 
...and again, OP admitted to recently failing his ATP ride. So we are not talking about someone who only failed their private and has had passed every ride since. As Hacker pointed out... what other criteria do you use? Flight time? I've flown with 15,000 hour idiots. The OP may be a great pilot. But he needs to put some time and checkride passes between his failures and getting hired.
 
Do you have a better idea?

Unfortunately I don't.

The only thing I can think of is for the DPE's to be more standard. One of my students failed a checkride a long time ago because he couldn't figure out how to get both engines on a PA-44 to run on one tank of gas. The reason he couldn't figure it out is because the POH does not explain how to do this, in fact the POH says the that the crossfeed is for single engine operations. So the examiner basically failed him because he couldn't perform something that went against the POH. I fought with the DPE for days on this but he never took back his pink slip. I told him if he ever did that to another student I would have to go to the FAA.

I had a student fail a CFII ride because he couldn't perform stalls under the hood. Not in the PTS

I could go on...

This may rock the boat, but I'm not sure being a CFI is the best example of real world experience.

Depends on your definition of "real world".
 
I could go on...

Not discounting the stories -- they're clearly evidence of DEs who were applying a non-standard standard -- but I have to believe that these are outliers rather than the norm.

In general, there aren't DEs out there making wild, arbitrary judgments on checkrides. In general, they're making the right calls and grading against the PTS. There are always going to be outliers, and it's pretty bad business to condemn the system because of a few bad apples.

There's definitely evidence of some differing standards among DEs as to what constitutes performance in accordance with the CTS. This is going to be true anywhere you have instructors or evaluators, and unless there is an established standards program it's tough to keep everyone on exactly the same path. The USAF has this, called a "standards and evaluation" shop, that creates and enforces standards amongst pilots and instructors. That's not to say that all is close to perfect amongst USAF instructors and evaluators: I've certainly seen military check pilots pass guys who probably would have been busted by other check pilots, and I've seen the opposite be true, too. Rarely, though, do they bust students on checkrides for items that are not clearly defined in the PTS/CTS.

Does anyone know what the FAA's standards program for DEs consists of?
 
Depends on your definition of "real world".

I agree with Ryan -- I think you'd have a hard time making an argument that instructing GA flying is representative of the rest of the flying world.

The good news is that airmanship is that fuzzy quality we all gain from our experience and largely transcends the aircraft or type of flying we do. A CFI is going to gain loads of airmanship related to a number of different disciplines from human nature, to social interaction, to other aviation decisionmaking -- all very good stuff. Certainly, there are types of experience and judgment that a pilot is going to gain as a GA CFI that develop him as an airman and make him poised for success in other professional flying environments.

But, let's not get carried away; that airmanship in and of itself isn't the end-all be-all of "experience" that a pilot will gain in those other areas. No more than my experience as a pointy-nosed fast-mover pilot endows me with some kind of omniscient 4G situational awareness that means I can step into any other aircraft at any time and instantly be the ace-of-the-base. Like the CFI, I have operated most of my career in a relatively small portion of the overall aviation pie, and there is a lot to experience outside of that bubble.
 
This topic has been disgust quit a bit lately. The Doctor example given is completely misused regarding this topic. I have 2 cosines that went thru med school; if i remember correctly they got to take the MCAT as many times as they wanted. They did well in classes, but getting a B in a course didn’t mean it was the end of there career. My brother is an accountant he's taken his CPA test several times. Look up the pass rate on a first time CPA test, and see what you find. I myself have busted three check rides out of 9, but during that time I was a STUDENT. I was never being paid to fly, in fact i was working 2 jobs, flying, and getting my bachelors degree. Now if I was a chief pilot I wouldn’t want to hire someone with a lot of busted check rides, but i would also look at there back ground... Since aviation has been my source of income i have not and will not ever fail a check ride (taken 4 since it has been and never had a problem). Being a 3 year CFI, i can tell you that 90% of check ride failures are due to money issues. When a student keeps running out of money, taking extra flights is not an option..
 
This topic has been disgust quit a bit lately. The Doctor example given is completely misused regarding this topic. I have 2 cosines that went thru med school


Is this attack of the iPhone auto-correct feature?
 
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