Pat Hill DPE Checkride Gouges

Pat Hill runs checkrides at CRQ and nearby airports across the private, instrument, commercial, and CFII levels. Twelve reports are on file for him. He opens every ride with the admin portion and wants your IACRA, certificate, medical, and photo ID to match perfectly. One applicant had to fix a date that differed by two days. He checks logbooks for airworthiness and likes everything tabbed, highlighted, and color keyed.

The oral tracks the ACS or PTS closely. He asks privileges and limitations, currency, and medical requirements right away. He builds real-world scenarios, like running out of currency after a set number of approaches, then how you get current again. For commercial, he asks what medical your CSEL privileges need and how to handle broken required equipment under ATOMATO FLAMES. He digs into systems, including what powers each instrument and where vacuum comes from. He wants spin recovery by PARE and clear talk on stalls and angle of attack.

Weight and balance is a favorite. He plans your cross-country to put you over gross so you must find a fuel stop, then has you redo the math on paper with less fuel. Expect a full weather briefing given out loud, with questions on fronts, icing in stratus versus cumulus, AIRMETs, surface analysis, and stability. Bring paper charts and a paper navlog. ForeFlight is accepted but he prefers pointing at paper.

The flight matches the level. Private rides include soft and short field work, a diversion without electronics, steep turns, emergency descent, power-on and power-off stalls, slow flight, engine-out to a chosen landing point, turns around a point, and hood work. He wants a clean slip. For multi, he drills accelerate-stop, accelerate-go, single-engine performance, Vmc demo, and prop feathering.