Failed The Checkride, need some encouragement from you guys

JaceTheAce

JaceTheAce

Well-Known Member
Okay... so I failed the final checkride for my Private here at UND today. I did fine on everything until we headed back into Grand Forks.

The air was a little turbulent and made it difficult to maintain airspeed and ailtitude during ground reference manuevers. After several S-turns across a lonely western Minnesotan road, we head back into Grand Forks. At this point I am discouraged and question the stage pilot's decision on wether or not to fail me. I tried telling myself I haven't failed yet and am doing good so far.

So heading back to Grand Forks everything is going fine until after Grand Forks Approach hands me over to Tower. I turn the small knob to change the ".55" part for the "120.55" tower frequency, but I failed to change the "120" part from the previous standby frequency (which was 122.85). So here I am like an idiot transmitting on the wrong frequency of 122.55 with no one to hear me. At this point I am confused and am questioning if I have the right frequency... so I do something even more stupid. I flip the frequencies over and end up contacting APPROACH again and for some stupid reason I make a radio call as if I'm contacting Tower. They tell me once again to go over to tower...which I finally do, but at this point I am 1/4 mile past the time I was supposed to contact tower. I over-run their transmission and through my nervous-wreck state of mind end up missing their instructions!

I was supposed to go southbound OUT OF THE TRAFFIC PATTERN to turn back northbound into downwind for runway 17L. I end up extending my entry westbound to go "southbound out of the traffic area" into the DOWNWIND path of another aircraft heading north to turn base for 17L! How stupid of me! So...stage pilot had to take over the controls to intervien and I failed my private pilot checkride.

So, I have to review "traffic pattern entries" with my instructor, do a couple of take-offs and landings in the pattern, then go back up with the stage pilot and do a normal, soft, and short-field take-offs and landings in the pattern... that's it. Then if all goes well, I get my private pilot certificate.

Has anyone had nervousnous overtake your ability to perform on a checkride to lead you to fail it, and what do you think I should do to help me overcome anxiety and nervousnous during another checkride? I know for sure that this would not have happened if this flight was not a checkride. But for the future so this doesn't happen again I need some advice.

I am discouraged, dissappointed, angry, and feel like a complete idiot.
 
Sounds like you had one of those "one thing goes wrong and it snowballs" days. It's okay to be disappointed, but I wouldn't get discouraged. The trick on checkrides is if something bad happens, do your best to move past it and try your best on the other aspects. Almost busted my IR checkride until I realized I wasn't doing that. I had a tough time with the partial panel, non-precision approach. Was about 1/2 deflected due to an 18 kt direct crosswind, and I couldn't get it centerd back up. After finally getting it somewhere close enough to do a low approach, I was frustrated and blew threw my climb out altitude and the DE took over. We then discussed whether I wanted to continue or not.

I made the decision to get as much done that day as I could and determined that I would nail everything from that point out. Long story short, I flew the rest of the ride perfectly, and the DE chalked my earlier mistakes up to checkride nerves and a nasty crosswind.

Good luck on the continuation, and I'm sure you'll nail it next time. Just remember if something goes wrong, you can't go back to change it. Concentrate on what you still have to do and do it as well as you can.
 
Thanks for the advice. I just need to calm down the nerves when I'm up in the air with the checkride pilot and enjoy the flight. I just think it was me questioning my prior ability on the ground reference manuevers and getting discouraged over it. This led me into becoming very nervous and I continued to question my ability to complete the flight. Through this, I did not put concentration on what was most important and ...well... failed it. In other things in life I sometimes get discouraged if I don't get it "perfect" but I guess I really wasn't all that bad. If I had left the bad ground reference manuever moves behind (even though the stage pilot said I did fine on them), I would've been more focused on the future tasks at hand.
 
You sound just like me when I was flight training: "Performance anxiety"

And you're not an idiot.

I think what really helped me was a change in attitude. Whenever I was anxious about a checkride, I would not perform well. I felt like I was on stage and the examiner would fail me for the slightest mistake. The day I started to change my attitude from "Wo is me" to "I'm going to whip this checkride's ass or die trying" my flying improved considerably.

(I'm a proud two-attempt graduate of the school of multi-engine instrument!)
 
Dont sweat it Jason, learn from your mistakes and kick its ass the second time. Everybody screws up sometimes, just learn from it and move on. Just relax cause you've done this stuff millions of times with your instructor. This is just another lesson with another instructor.
 
Don't lose any sleep over it - you learned from your mistakes and you'll pass the next time.
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Good luck!
 
For future refrence, rember that YOU can stop a checkride that isn't going well.

If you do that, you get a "letter of discontinuance" just like when you do the oral one day, and the flying the next. The next day when you are more composed, you only have to do the items that were not completed.

You should NOT get a "letter of disaproval" if you do this (if you do, notify the FSDO).

Having the guts to say "I'm not performing up to par, and need some more pratice" isn't a failure, it's a sign of good decision making and judgement.


I know very few pilots that haven't falied a checkride somewhere along the line. Welcome to the club.
 
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Has anyone had nervousnous overtake your ability to perform on a checkride to lead you to fail it,

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Yes. I got so nervous on my CFII checkride I almost busted a hold entry. I was sweaty, losing focus, and honestly ready to sucker punch the somewhat abusive DPE in the other seat.

Now when I get pushed hard I get angry, so it became a mental game of me vs him... don't let him win. I won.
 
I failed my private too. We did all the airwork and ground reference stuff first and that all went great except the DE wanted me to recover at the first inducation of a stall. I did as he asked then he kind of barked at me a little about not taking it all the way to the first indication of the stall, asked me to do it again, and after about the third time of doing this I let it go to the full stall which he was happy with. Anyway, that was not the problem with the ride, but it did get me kind of off track with the way he had barked at me. Then it was on to the cross country portion and at this point I thought I had the checkride in the bag becasue diversions and landings had been my strongpoint. Only problems I had were with airworrk and that was behind me. He modified my cross country on the ground before we left and he wanted me to use this tiny little airstrip as my fist ckeckpoint. We'd overfly the departure airport, fly to that ckeckpoint, get a groundspeed check then he'd give me the diversion. Well I was unfamilliar with the area, didn't see the little 30 foot x 1500 foot runway and flew right over it without even realizing it. He then told me I had simulated engine roughness and had to land at the nearest airport. Since I didn't realize I had already passed it, I continued on for a couple minutes, then realized my mistake, turned back and circled over it for about 10 minutes looking for it. I knew it was right below me I just didn't see it because it was so much smaller than I was expecting. In my defense, I've known commercial pilot candidates that couldn't find this airstrip and I thought it was a little unfair that he expected a private to be able to find it, but he did and had it been a real emergency we'd have been flying around with a rough engine for fifteen minutes, he decided our engine would have quit and we'd be dead by then. Busted me for PIC judgement. We then went back to do the landings but my mind was no longer on the flight. Did the normal, short field and soft field fine, but on the forward slip to no-flap first attempt totally overshot he runway. He let me try again and I made the runway fine but slipped the wrong way and busted that too. Then on the emergency landing I floated about 3/4 down the runway before he told me to go around. Then we taxied back and he gave me the disapproval. On the re-check he wanted to see pilotage, dead-reconning, forward slip to no flap, and emergency landings. Got through the piotage and dead reconning fine only because he overlooked that I didn't change my altitude when I went from a westely course to an easterly course. He sure gave me an earfull though. Then we flew back, did the forward slip to no flap fine, then he had me do a series of short field landings.
confused.gif
Never did have me re-do the emergency landing but after yelling and ridiculing me about how bad my short field landings were he gave me my certificate and told me that I passed but just barely, and to be carefull not to kill my self or my passengers.

I just had a bad flight on my first attempt. I made some mistakes I had never made before or since, simply because my head was not in the game. Although I do take most of the resonsibility for busting the ride, I do feel the DE's barking at me kind of set me off, and he was very unfrofessional about the way he pointed out my mistakes. I've gone to a different DE for the rest of my checkrides. He is a lot of fun to fly with and I passed the rest of them with no problems.
 
I always remember Hubert (?) Vogelsinger, a somewhat famous soccer coach, using a particular phrase in his teaching "You fail your way to success." Now, when he said this he wasn't just referring to soccer. You learn from your mistakes and build upon the experience. As long as you are willing to pick yourself up and try again, then you will eventually succeed. Failing sucks but it does make success much sweeter when you finally nail it.
 
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For future refrence, rember that YOU can stop a checkride that isn't going well.

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Can't at UND.

Jace,

Sorry to hear about the bust.

Things to remember. Always, Always put your frequencies and verify they're correct before needing them. There are 4 spots for frequencies and everyone should be used. A thing I tell my students, when you hear it on ATIS, put it in. Chances are you'll use it.
 
So what, you busted. Welcome to the club, my friend!. Wasn't your first, and won't be your last, less-than-stellar flight. Like everyone else said, put it behind you, file the learning points into your aviation and SA bag of tricks, and press on. So long as you learned something, and didn't break yourself or the airplane, then there's a positive from all this.

Now pass the next one........

.....or I'll have to come up there.......

.....and I hate the cold.......
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Which one did you bust, Mikey?
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Friggen Joey never did. Never studied either. GRR!
 
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Which one did you bust, Mikey?
smile.gif
Friggen Joey never did. Never studied either. GRR!

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Initial CFI, with that old guy who had the office on the south side of PRC...still can't remember his name. Biggest problem was, and I tend to agree, was that I was being too mechanical like Riddle had taught me then. He threw some monkey wrenches into the mix that I hadn't planned for, and I got behind a little so far as I can remember (mind you all, this was 13 years ago....)
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That was probably the old geezer that failed me on my multi-engine instrument.
 
Hey, Jace. No sweat, man. I just took a checkride this week, too. Truth is, I probably deserved to bust it. I just happened to have a very cool DE. I did a simulated engine out 180-degree accuracy landing and didn't have enough altitude to make it to the runway and was approaching the runway threshold on 45 degree angle. Now talk about feeling like an idiot!! I obviously had to go around, and the DE barked at me pretty good. For some reason, he let me have another go at it. Hey, we're only human, man. Don't let it have a negative effect on you. Just focus on what you need to work on and grab the bull by the horns. Now go get 'em, man!!
smile.gif
 
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
For future refrence, rember that YOU can stop a checkride that isn't going well.

[/ QUOTE ]

Can't at UND.

Jace,

Sorry to hear about the bust.

Things to remember. Always, Always put your frequencies and verify they're correct before needing them. There are 4 spots for frequencies and everyone should be used. A thing I tell my students, when you hear it on ATIS, put it in. Chances are you'll use it.

[/ QUOTE ]

I know...the thing is, I was so stressed about the fact that I was transmitting on the wrong frequency that I could not think rationally to move over to the correct frequency. I could not believe that my mind actually shut down like that. It's never happened before to me... probably because I've never been in a situation like this. What I should do is look to the bright side of it and know that it'll probably allow me to deal with stress and emotions on future stage checks a lot better.
 
...and thanks everyone for the encouragement and advice. It's greatly appreciated. Everyone's really positive on this board - we've got some great people here.

My failure is not going to discourage me nor make me think twice about my flying capabilities. I'm just going to take this disappointment and put it into doing excellent the second time around. Once I have my private pilot's license it will be one of the happiest days of my life. I have a review flight tomorrow morning with my instructor and will hopefully finish the 3 landings in the pattern on Monday or Tuesday with the stage pilot.

...And my Dad told me today, "You fail your way to success".
 
[ QUOTE ]
I could not believe that my mind actually shut down like that. It's never happened before to me... probably because I've never been in a situation like this. What I should do is look to the bright side of it and know that it'll probably allow me to deal with stress and emotions on future stage checks a lot better.

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That's exactly what happened to me too. And that is good advise we should all take.
 
Thats too bad man, you'll bounce back no problem. I failed my 221, 27 checkride. I kicked the orals butt, but in the sim, istead of just telling me stuff to do, he just had everything printed out on a sheet that I was to read and perform. Essentially combining the entire flight and instrument pattern. Not a big deal except for some reason I misread something and tracked an NDB in the wrong direction. He unsat me there and I chose to continue. I was pretty much in a "f#$k it" mood and screwed tracking a localizer off an arc as well. I was really ticked. No, ticked is a huge understatement. I got over it though and so will you.

Good luck with your review.

Tom
 
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