Thursday, November 2, 2017

Checkrides

I'm occasionally asked why I don't have things like a Multi-Engine checkride on MyFlightbook.

My flip answer is simple: because there is no such thing.

Specifically, a checkride for a license (properly “certificate” in FAA-land, but I’ll be informal on that point here) indicates a level of privileges (private pilot, instrument, commercial, ATP, etc.), which specifies what you can do as a holder of that license.  That license comes with restrictions specifying in which categories/classes (and types, for aircraft that require a type rating) those privileges may be exercised.

So a "Multi-engine Commercial Checkride" is really just shorthand for "A commercial checkride which applies to (possibly among others) multi-engine aircraft."

This is a somewhat academic distinction, of course, but there are two strong pragmatic reasons not to offer this as well:
  • The number of such possible checkrides would be huge.  Specifically, it would the [the number of possible ratings] x [the number of possible category/class/(type) to which it could apply].  At the moment, that's over 200 possible checkrides, and that's not even counting type-specific checkrides.
  • It's pointless to log it anyhow, because all of the information is already present in the aircraft used for the flight.  If you did your commercial checkride in a multi-engine aircraft, it's pretty clear that it was a "commercial multi-engine checkride."  If you do your instrument checkride in a helicopter, it's obviously your instrument-rotorcraft checkride.  
So congratulations on passing your checkride!  Just go ahead and log it according to the privilege you earned, and then go out and fly!

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