ROBBIE ROBINSON

"Hello. I am your Examiner...I am here to help you!" Oh yeah...Really?

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I AM ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE who loses two nights of sleep before an Instrument Rating Check Ride (IRT).

I spent ten years of my life at boarding school and four years at university. When that was over I made a promise to myself that I would never leave home again and since it had taken me seven attempts to pass Mathematics ‘O’- level (GCSE), I would never take another exam in my life...ever!

Then I took up aviation and in forty-five years of ‘Contract Flying’, I spent four Christmases at home and was never more than six months away from a career-threatening examination.

The stupid thing was that I only failed one IRT and that was because the examiner had popped the Marker Beacons Circuit-Breaker before I strapped myself in and I reset it during the pre-start checks and I failed the test right there, because the rules state that a popped circuit-breaker may be reset twice in the air, but if a circuit-breaker is found to be open on the ground, it must be reset by a qualified engineer...Fair enough, but he would have saved me quite a lot of money if he could have told me that I had failed, before we got airborne, instead of at the end of what would otherwise have been a successful check-ride.