Oral
The DPE I used is pretty standardized on the CFI oral. They want to see us present a couple areas according to ACS, the area he selected were:
- FOI: B (Learning Process), E (Elements of Effective Teaching in a Professional Environment), F (Elements of Effective Teaching that Include Risk Management and Accident Prevention)
- Technical Subject Area: C (Runway Incursion Avoidance), G (National Airspace System), K (Endorsement and Logbook Entries)
- Maneuvers: Steep Turns, Traffic Patterns
- System Malfunctions
Being a CFI candidate, you’re expected to be able to give a presentation on these areas fluently so make sure you actually practiced it a couple times, adding your own take / stories to make it more interesting and edit the slides as you see fit. (For example, I edited the National Airspace System slides extensively because I did not like how it talks about Basic VFR weather minimums, I removed that from every class of airspace and used the “triangle” to talk about it in the end and also consolidated all transponder / ADS-B required areas because they are very similar.)
For the endorsements, it was not a presentation but rather scenario-based questions, such as What endorsements do you need to give to a new PPL students? How do you get them started? etc. The most interesting questions I got asked on this is to look into the required maneuvers to teach in 61.87(d). They asked me to write it all down and sort it in the order I would teach my students: basically think about how do you build learning blocks, teach them pre-flight taxi / take-off of course but ground reference maneuvers will be very handy before you teach them traffic pattern and stalls will be useful for landings, etc.
This part took about 2 hours and we moved on the flight.
Flight
It flew by fast, this took me 1.3hrs on the Hobbs. We took off with a normal take-off and they had me teach them climbing and climbing turns, it’s very similar to the commercial ride except you just gotta keep talking. Once we’re in the maneuvering area, we started with steep turns. Steep turns has always been the shaky one for me, I even started with wrong rudders 😅 but I talked about my mistake and correct for it and my right side one was perfect, fortunately it was within tolerance so we moved on to Lazy Eight. Again, a lot of talking and this was also within tolerance. We did the unusual altitudes where I need to teach the DPE on how to recover: remember you want to give your students some rooms to make mistakes, guide them but only take over when it goes out of your safety envelope.
We moved on to stalls, I did a power-off stalls and cross-control stall and they had no comments on it. They called the engine failed so I started an emergency descent (while talking through it still) and we ran the checklist and started head towards an emergency landing point. I called the engine failure scenario is now concluded (2000 AGL), then I start to setup for forced landing. I talked about the Vg and why we try to hold it in an engine failure case like this while going through the engine failure (basically the ABCDE). I called the exercise off at 800 AGL.
Minimal Safe Altitude
Remember your DPE may or may not call these out for you, you’re the PIC and CFI, you should know when you should stop unsafe exercises.
For example, 91.119 requires you to maintain 500ft AGL over non-congested area. While there are no specific altitude called out for emergency landing, you should have a number in mind. For various stalls though, ACS does specify a minimum altitude and these must be adhere to.
As we’re now lower towards the ground, we had me setup to do some ground reference maneuvers, we did a S-turn and then an eight on pylons. One thing my DPE loved me doing was to always climb out at the end of ground reference maneuvering, we’re low and close to the ground. Don’t forget during these maneuvers, you should be teaching and talking about how winds is affecting your track and how you are correcting for it. For eight on pylons, according to PHAK, you should make your first turn into the winds, so you should plan your entry accordingly.
We then head back to the airport, we climbed back to 3000ft, a reasonable cruise altitude and I talked about we should get the AWOS and start making position reports on CTAF. I talked about how I plan to enter the traffic pattern, how do I infer and merge into the traffic pattern at a non-towered airport. As we arrived at the airport, we first did a normal landing. I landed the airplane as soooooooft as I could, as the DPE is famous for loving to see a soft touch on the landing and then we did the soft field take-off/landing, he smiled and told me just do the same soft touch-down as you did the first time, so I did lol I did the short-field take-off and the DPE took over for short-field landing as I teach him through it. I talked about looking at the PAPI, verify he did extended flaps and kept my hand an feet around the control in case I need to recover. He landed perfectly but he forgot to retract flaps and simulate max breaking so I told him he did a prefect job on landing but sadly had failed the maneuvers. (and he jokingly sad “oh well I suck, I guess I failed my checkride” lol.) That was it! We taxied back to the parking and he congratulated me on becoming a CFI!
Always Fly the Airplane
DO NOT GET COMFORTABLE UNTIL YOU PARKED THE AIRPLANE. I stopped the airplane as we leave the runway to run after-landing checklist and make sure we ran the shutdown checklist at parking spot.
My biggest takeaway from this is to realize that I’m relying on the instrument way too much and I should teach my students to look outside more often as well. Teach them not just the attitude to fly but also outside clues to read-in. This is especially important for maneuvers.