JOHAN WALDEN
HOURS
- READY OR NOT! I was spending my afternoon bean-counting. All the ‘one-point-somethings’ in my logbook were steadily adding up towards the ‘Magic 200’ as I counted and test time was near. THE PROSPECT OF SOMEHOW finding a way to accumulate 200 hours had often left my throat dry. But now that it was finally about to tick over, it felt almost surreal. Wanting to make extra sure I hadn’t made a terrible miscalculation somewhere, I cross-checked row with column on the spreadsheet... and breathed a sigh of relief. The total came to an amusing 199,9 hours.
HI S LOR DS HI P WOUL DN’ T GE T S I L LY
The result of scrupulous tracking of progress and hours; my logbook held everything I needed for a CPL – minus the 0,1 hours (or six minutes) to the magic number. This left me with a convenient excuse to take one more training flight to get my eye in (in other words beat my miserable nerves into submission) before taking the dreaded check-ride. In this, I would have to woo a divinely appointed Examiner with my ‘expert knowledge’ and laser-sharp flying skills – if I had any.
42
October 2021
Just how laser-sharp I had to be was laid down in the seven page test form: airspeed within 10kt, altitude within 100ft and so on. Unfortunately my racing mind pictured a sternfaced examiner laden with gold on his shoulders and a clipboard to strike off the lives I had left. Just like the testing officer for my driver’s test, who even made a note when I removed one hand from the steering wheel to wind the window up. As much as everyone tried to assure me this wasn’t the case, I couldn’t help feeling nervous. Fortunately my instructor was one who bolstered what little confidence I did have and was on my side.
With D-day set, we started off test-prep with a mock ground evaluation. The CPL test would be broken down into two parts: oral examination and flight test. While the forms had a detailed list of everything to be tested in the air, I had pretty
