Beyond the PPL | CB Instrument Rating
http://www.pilotweb.aero Pilot September 2017 | 45
high enough for us to avoid. It looked like
a go.
All that was left now was for me to
prepare the aircraft for tomorrow’s test.
Tanks had to be topped up, equipment
checked, hood placed within easy reach,
various aircraft documents organised−
these would be subject to close scrutiny
along with my licence and medical. I made
sure I put new batteries into my headset
and kept some spare to hand since, as we
all know, batteries have a habit of dying at
precisely the wrong moment. The devil, as
always, was in the detail. Even my pens
were double-checked to make sure they
actually worked.
The final operation was to enter the
examiner’s specific callsign into the
transponder. This, I believe, is a
peculiarity of the UK, designed to alert
ATC that we were conducting a test and
that they should therefore be extra nice to
us, and give us plenty of latitude for errors
at all times. That was the hope anyway. At
any rate, out went my normal callsign,
G-MICI, and in went the rather more
alarming Exam 101, a name uncomfortably
reminiscent of George Orwell’s torture
chamber in 1984.
The only thing left to do was to get
some dinner and go to bed. Mark drove
me to the airport hotel just down the road.
For reasons that quite escaped me, he was
in excellent spirits and brimming with
optimism about tomorrow’s test, while I
did my best to manage the swarming
butterflies in my stomach. Resisting the
temptation to plunge into detailed revision
of every possible approach and route we
might fly tomorrow−a sure guarantee of
a sleepless night−I grabbed a quick bite
and headed to bed. But the fates were
against me.The wall of my hotel bedroom was, it
transpired, unusually thin. On the other
side of it was the loudest-snoring man I
have ever encountered in my life. He had
gone to bed well before me and there was
no waking him. I tried to move rooms but
the hotel was full. I even contemplated
sleeping on one of the sofas in the lobby,
but this was not permitted. Back I went to
my room and the symphony of guttural
noises coming from next door. I stuffed
toilet paper into my ears, pulled a pillow
over my head and reflected that, in the
movie version of this story, the snoring
bloke would almost certainly turn out to
be my examiner.
When Mark picked me up the next
morning the sun was shining and my eyes
felt like poached eggs after a severely
broken night. I briefly wondered whether
to cancel the test but then decided just to
go for it. Per ardua ad astra! I drank
several mugs of black coffee and went to
shake hands with John who had just flown
in from Hawarden in his PA-28. He was
the consummate professional, and
immediately put me at my ease. I was
tempted to mention the snoring bloke but
decided it was a bad idea. Instead I poured
myself yet another mug of black coffee and
drank the lot as we went through a very
Gloucestershire Airport — northernmost extreme of the test route rigorous briefing.
And the result was...