Commercial Rating Tips for the Modern Pilot

[Txbyker]

I am considering getting my commercial rating, not because I want to pursue a career in aviation but I think going for the rating will increase my skills to be a better skilled and safer pilot.  I bought the King Commercial Rating Course online and went through all of the videos.  I read on here that the King course was a good one.  The Kings do a great job of explaining what the FAA wants you to learn.  However, the videos seem to be pretty old, like perhaps the 80's and 90's vintage.  A question for you recent commercial rated pilots - do we really need to dust off the sliding old flight computer and paper charts for the tests and the practical? I know I need to know how to work all of this manually but in today's world I think we have tools like iPads and all of the online planning tools that make testing on old paper and slide computers obsolete.

 

Russ

[aviatoreb]

Yup - you can tell how old that king video by how young the Kings look, and how cool Loran is going to be.

 

I am working on com with a similar motivation. It was stalled for 2 months first by weather and then by annual - just got airplane back today.  But I did the written last month.  Yay.

[piperpainter]

I 100% agree with you that the video's are a mix of old, older and then randomly new! Martha & John get 20 years younger and older all in the same topic! Anyway, it did pretty good for me and I got my sign off paper and will be doing my Commercial written soon I hope.

 

I am going to be starting my multi-CFI etc. Hopefully I can start offering instruction in Mooney's on the side. I think if you get through the show, and the test you can throw the E6B stuff back to the curb...or go digital! 

[yvesg]

Might

Yup - you can tell how old that king video by how young the Kings look, and how cool Loran is going to be.

 

I am working on com with a similar motivation. It was stalled for 2 months first by weather and then by annual - just got airplane back today.  But I did the written last month.  Yay.

Glad you got your bird back Erik... by the way, the Fly in on the ice organizer told me last Saturday that he will put sand on the ice :-)

Let me know if you change your mind...

Yves

[Will W]

As an instructor pushing through a lot of commercial students, I have to say pilots need to know how to read charts for the check ride.  There is a portion of the exam that is just sitting with a sectional unfolded and the examiner says, "What is that airspace there?  To what altitude?  What are your cloud clearance requirements?  What is this symbol?  Is it important to us?"

 

As far as E6B knowledge, your examiner will dig and dig and make darn sure you know how fore flight calculated your wind correction angle, ground speed, etc for you.  If you don't know how to do it, you will simply fail.  Especially with the examiners at DWH.

 

The commercial check ride isn't a check ride for the modern pilot.  It is more of a private check ride with tighter standards adding in regulations for flying for hire.  Really, you'll be doing most of the same maneuvers as your private (Chandelle's, lazy eights, eights on pilots are new).  It requires a lot of work and dedication like your private.  If you want to go through that and can dedicate to it, it's for you... but it's not a "Here's my fore flight flight plan, lets go do steep turns to 50 degrees."

 

Don't short yourself, have fun and learn something (and relearn something)... After all, we get to fly, can we really beat that?

[M016576]

You may not want the rating to actually use the commercial privileges, but your examiner needs to make sure you can perform to standards. No garauntees that you'll have fancy glass, a GPS, or even an iphone available on a for-hire run as a frieght dog or what have you. Like the post above states- it requires work and dedication.

[Txbyker]

As an instructor pushing through a lot of commercial students, I have to say pilots need to know how to read charts for the check ride.  There is a portion of the exam that is just sitting with a sectional unfolded and the examiner says, "What is that airspace there?  To what altitude?  What are your cloud clearance requirements?  What is this symbol?  Is it important to us?"

 

As far as E6B knowledge, your examiner will dig and dig and make darn sure you know how fore flight calculated your wind correction angle, ground speed, etc for you.  If you don't know how to do it, you will simply fail.  Especially with the examiners at DWH.

 

The commercial check ride isn't a check ride for the modern pilot.  It is more of a private check ride with tighter standards adding in regulations for flying for hire.  Really, you'll be doing most of the same maneuvers as your private (Chandelle's, lazy eights, eights on pilots are new).  It requires a lot of work and dedication like your private.  If you want to go through that and can dedicate to it, it's for you... but it's not a "Here's my fore flight flight plan, lets go do steep turns to 50 degrees."

 

Don't short yourself, have fun and learn something (and relearn something)... After all, we get to fly, can we really beat that?

Thanks! I will plan for this. I do know the manual calculations and appreciate the comments bridging old methods to new! Russ

[Txbyker]

You may not want the rating to actually use the commercial privileges, but your examiner needs to make sure you can perform to standards. No garauntees that you'll have fancy glass, a GPS, or even an iphone available on a for-hire run as a frieght dog or what have you. Like the post above states- it requires work and dedication.

This makes a lot of sense. Thanks! Russ

[aviatoreb]

As an instructor pushing through a lot of commercial students, I have to say pilots need to know how to read charts for the check ride.  There is a portion of the exam that is just sitting with a sectional unfolded and the examiner says, "What is that airspace there?  To what altitude?  What are your cloud clearance requirements?  What is this symbol?  Is it important to us?"

 

As far as E6B knowledge, your examiner will dig and dig and make darn sure you know how fore flight calculated your wind correction angle, ground speed, etc for you.  If you don't know how to do it, you will simply fail.  Especially with the examiners at DWH.

 

The commercial check ride isn't a check ride for the modern pilot.  It is more of a private check ride with tighter standards adding in regulations for flying for hire.  Really, you'll be doing most of the same maneuvers as your private (Chandelle's, lazy eights, eights on pilots are new).  It requires a lot of work and dedication like your private.  If you want to go through that and can dedicate to it, it's for you... but it's not a "Here's my fore flight flight plan, lets go do steep turns to 50 degrees."

 

Don't short yourself, have fun and learn something (and relearn something)... After all, we get to fly, can we really beat that?

 

Thanks for the heads up summary.

 

So far - all the oral phase stuff you are describing seems to match pretty closely the spirit of the commercial written I just did.  Mostly from my perspective the written was a much more thorough version of the PPL test, but then there is also a good bit of instrument reading and other IFR written type questions, which must be especially hard for a pilot who is wanting to get a commercial without an IFR first, but otherwise just requires review if you already have the IFR.  Plus some commercial specific questions, like distinguishing various sorts of hypoxia, and rules for carriage, etc.  Overall I think it is amounting to an excellent forced expanding of my knowledge base.  Of course I have not taken the practical/oral yet so I cannot say more on how that will go.

 

And the maneuvers are not just skill-expanding, but they are just plain fun!  Or I should say plane fun.

[aviatoreb]

Might

Glad you got your bird back Erik... by the way, the Fly in on the ice organizer told me last Saturday that he will put sand on the ice :-)

Let me know if you change your mind...

Yves

 

No kidding!  I will switch to PM for that discussion.  This evening.

[jlunseth]

The answer to your question whether you will need to demonstrate pilotage and dead reckoning skills during the commercial checkride is, like many questions about the checkride, set out in the PTS.  The answer is yes, you will need to demonstrate pilotage and dead reckoning, and the examiner may require you to pull out your old manual E6B and do some computations.  Typically, the DPE will give you a trip to plan the night before.  You will then need to do all the computations, assess weather, etc.  You will need the old style waypoints on the ground that are fairly close together, you will need to spot them and compare your GS, fuel usage, etc. to what you have in your flight plan.  There is a requirement to perform a ground speed check at some point, and if you watched the King video on the checkride, you saw that done with a circular slide rule.  DPE's vary in whether they will allow you to substitute your electronics for old style nav. skills.  I have good avionics so I can read all the flight parameters moment by moment in the cockpit.  Frustrating to have to do the old style nav., but my DPE was good about that, she let me use whatever was available.  Some DPE's have been known to cause that instrumentation to "fail."

 

The one good thing about the commercial checkride is that once you pass it, you will never again have to do nav. and dead reckoning for the FAA.  You can get further commercial ratings (i.e. multi-engine) but the task tables for additional ratings in the PTS say you are not required to do nav. and dead reckoning for any additional ratings.  Once your done your done.

 

Commercial is a fun rating.  The most valuable thing I spent time learning, was the Power Off 180 and learning about making it to the airport with an engine out.  Practicing it really helps with an understanding of how far you should be from the runway while in the pattern.

[adrian]

I did my commercial rating last year in my Mooney.  I used the King videos to learn some of the theory, and the Gleim book to run through the essentials the night before the test.  There were no questions in the exam that required use of the E6B (there were plenty where I could have used it, but it was always possible to identify the right answer without it, or at least to eliminate the wrong answers).  I may have just lucked out with the questions that came up!

 

For the checkride, I never unfolded my paper chart.  We went pretty much straight into the performance manouvers, then back to the pattern for several landings.  While it was fun doing the test in my own airplane, it would have been easier to master power off approaches to precision landings in something draggier.

 

I had done an Instrument checkride with the same DPE a few weeks before the Commercial checkride, which may have influenced his decision to dispense with the dead reckoning navigation so quickly.