As soon as I found out who I was testing with I was pretty excited. I had Charlie Elliott, a rather famous flight tester from Canterbury. Charlie's been a flight tester for a few years- he also did my Dad's PPL flight test back in 1976!
The weather was perfect for a test, with light variable winds even up at 2000ft, and Nil Significant Cloud. We took off on Grass 02 at Christchurch in Cherokee 140 ZK-DUP on a West Junction Departure, tracking towards West Junction then on towards Kirwee and Darfield before reaching the Darfield North training area. Once there we went over the majority of what I had been taught in PPL lessons, including steep turns, stalls, slow flight, a forced landing without power, slow flight and low flying. Once that was completed we headed back towards the Aero Club's private airfield at West Melton. We performed a standard overhead join, followed by a flapless landing, touch and go, a precision landing and then another touch and go. Once the West Melton circuits were completed I called Christchurch Tower to request a rejoin and got cleared straight to base leg for Grass 02, where we did another Precision Landing to finish off. I was fairly confident that I hadn't screwed things up too badly but it was still a huge relief to hear Charlie tell me that I'd passed.
Now that all my PPL training is complete I'll be off on PPL Cross Countries this week, heading to exotic places like Timaru and Ashburton. Once they're out of the way it will be time for CPL Cross Countries which is where the real fun starts.
Here's a map of where I flew on my Flight Test:
View PPL Flight Test in a larger map
Sorry for the lack of pics, all I have at the moment is an iPod camera so I'm trying to sort something out. In the meantime here are a couple from Ben Wynn which show the sick views we get to see every day :
