Thanks to those of you who sent good luck wishes. The good news is, I didn’t fail my checkride. The bad news is, I only completed about 30% of it.
Last night, around 1:30 a.m., there was a thunderstorm here bad enough to produce winds that woke me up wondering if it was a tornado. Had a hard time getting back to sleep after that (finally did, though). So when the alarm went off, I wasn’t as rested as I wanted to be. I thought this was starting out a lot like flying the line (not rested enough, getting up when I don’t really want to).
On our way to the sim building, we saw some lightening. When we got there, the power was partially out, or maybe just coming back on. The sim technician said we’d have to wait until things settled down before we got it. The weather was mostly passed at that point though.
We were able to actually get into the simulator on time. We got our preflights done, started up, taxiied, did all the checklists to get ready to take off, and just before I was going to push the power up for takeoff, the rudder started to deflect, then the elevator and ailerons. About the time I started to ask about that, we felt the ‘thunk’ of the sim platform bottoming out. All the hydraulic flight control and motion loading had stopped. The odd part was that everything else (lighting, visual, instruments, etc.) was still working. Apparently all that is on a battery backup. We couldn’t call out, so we got out of the sim to discover the power out in the building.
The power stayed out for over two hours. Our period was only 4 hours long and there was another crew in behind us. As we waited for the power to come back up, we told stories, tried to figure out scenarios of how we would get things done, and commented about how this is kinda the way things sometimes work in the real world.
Finally, the power came back on. It took a while after that before the sim was rebooted. Due to a kinda funny string of circumstances, we noticed a brake problem and decided to see if it’d fix itself. After taking off, I discovered that the trim didn’t work. It turns out the two were related and, though I called for the stabilizer trim inoperative checklist, they had us stop flying and tried to reset the sim. More delay… Turns out in the sim the flight control loading is hydraulic except the brakes and trim. They’re pneumatic and the air compressor had shut down during the power failure and not restarted. And apparently it takes several minutes to get the pneumatic pressure back…
So finally, with less than an hour remaining, we were able to start. We decided to do as much as we could in the time we had remaining. We got a normal takeoff, the maneuvers (steep turns and stalls), a no flap, no slat landing, and a non-precision approach done. Then we had to get out and call it a day.
The plan now is for me to complete the rest of the ride tomorrow in hopefully well under a full period and then go home tomorrow night. So, see, I did need more good luck. This sim is so realistic, it’ll break and cause a delay just like an airplane… 😉
V-