Yesterday morning I received my Private Pilot license at Cable airport in Upland.  It took 2 years for me to complete my training (mostly because the summers have kept me too busy to find time for flying), which was MUCH longer than I thought when I naively picked up the phone one day and called a random flight school.  You legally only need 40 hours of flight time to get your license.  I had 63.7.  If I could have done the training without huge breaks in-between flights, I probably could have done it in close to 40, but you build up rust pretty fast as a student pilot when you aren’t in the air for a couple months.

The examination was one of the more difficult things I’ve done in recent memory.  It’s been a while since I’ve had a proper “boss,” and there aren’t many people in my life that could make me feel 2 inches tall.  However, when you have just barely begun to master something, and you are asked to demonstrate it to someone who’s been literally doing it full time their entire adult life, you’re bound to feel like a putz.  That was me.  My examiner had been flying since 16, an airline captain (yes, full captain on a 737) since 30, and had over 22,000 hours of flight time.  It was the aviation equivalent of having Kelly Slater judge my surfing or having Neil Peart judge my drumming.

So while most of the exam went fine, my examiner pounced on any weaknesses he sensed, and drilled deep down like a festering cavity on a tooth.  Like water leaking into a boat through a small hole, he’d slowly start sinking the whole ship, a drop at a time, with questions that made me feel like 2 years of flying had prepared me no better than a casual glance through a magazine.  We spent 20 minutes discussing True Airspeed because I had used the wrong scale on my little flight computer.  I told him I understood the concept.  He defiantly stated “prove it.”  He wanted to make sure I actually knew, but mostly, he wanted to see me sweat.  He wanted to see whether I was the kind of person who would crack and give up, or who had enough confidence and resolve to keep going.  In the air, these things matter.

And that was before we even got into the damned plane.  The engine gave me a hard time when starting it.  He told me that what I was doing to get it going was “a good way to start an engine fire.”  We taxied to the runway, and while en-route I set some avionics.  He said that was “very dangerous.”  We took off and turned crosswind.  I didn’t apply enough rudder in the turn and he said it was “a good way to get the aircraft into a spin.”  By doing what I normally did, I had, apparently, nearly killed us three times before we had climbed 500 feet above the ground.  It went on, and on, and on.  Too fast.  Too slow.  Don’t turn that way.  Don’t read that checklist now.  Don’t use flaps.  Why are you slipping the airplane now?  About half of what I did brought strong words of consternation, and dire warnings of fiery crashes and dead family members.

But at the end of the day, it’s his job to evaluate my performance by the FAA’s standards, not his own, and after a nearly 5 hour exam, he shook my hand, gave me my license, shot a couple polaroids at my request, and sent me on my way.  I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.  I was literally afraid that the next thing I did would be the thing that sent him running after me, saying “what the hell do you think you’re doing?!?”, and that he’d tear up my license and call me a cab.

I learned a lot yesterday – about flying, and about myself.  I’m certainly grateful that the examiner was hard on me, because it will make me a better pilot.  But I’ll also get a sinking feeling in my stomach every time I fly over Cable airport that I’m doing it all wrong, and that somewhere, an old grizzled pilot is watching me and shaking his head in dismay.