Last chance to clean up

Well, tomorrow is the checkride, so Kent and I went up for some final tuning. Things didn’t go as we’d planned, but it was good anyway.

The weather was ideal for IFR training – 4000 foot ceilings and light rain. We headed to Chino first to shoot the ILS there and have breakfast at Flo’s diner. GREAT food. I called the DE who is doing my checkride tomorrow, and asked what kind of cross country he wanted me to plan. He told me to plan a one way trip to Monterey. I told Kent I didn’t want any help with that – I wanted to do it all myself to be sure I could do it.

After a 20 minute hold for release, we then departed for Long Beach. As soon as we were off the ground, on went the stickers for partial panel. I flew pretty poorly – I hadn’t done any partial panel work in a while. It started to come back towards the end of the approach, after I’d busted altitude (just once – but by 300 feet). We landed and availed ourselves of the restroom facilities. Then came the problem. We started the plane back up, and the alternator appeared to have quit. We tried a few things, called our A&P for advice – nothing. Now we had a problem. We really needed to get it back to Van Nuys to be worked on for my checkride. We departed VFR, and as soon as the tower approved us for a frequency change, we turned off everything but the transponder to conserve battery. We made it back fine, and got the alternator replaced. A couple of fun trips around the pattern (just to test the alternator, and see who could do the best short field landing) and we debriefed at LuLu’s restaurant. I got everything in order, had Kent endorse everything that needed to be endorsed, and we were all done.

So that’s it. Checkride tomorrow. 41 hours of instrument time, 35 or so lessons, more money than I care to think about. I’m confident, but very nervous. Some final studying for the oral tonight (weather mostly) and then I’ll try and get some sleep.