Mock Skills Test

I arrived Monday night for my mock skills test with Christian, the planned nav route was going to be the Sheffield VRP to Shire Brook, then from Shirebrook to Market Rasen. I planned the route before heading into the school and noticed that the route took me through Scampton MATZ (Milatary Airspace). Scampton is where the red arrows practice and if they are "active" you are not going to get through there so I game them a ring and asked if R313 was active. R313 is the designated code for that area and nope, it was clear all day.

So I arrived at the school complete with my plan and off we went in a PA-28 Warrior (G-BODD), once overhead the VRP I turned onto my heading for Shirbrook, once overhead Shirebrook I turned towards Market Rasen after a couple of minutes Christian told me he would take over the radio and asked me to divert to Sandtoft.

I wasn't quite sure where I was, but knew I would be overhead Gamston at some stage so drew the new course from Gamstons overhead straight to Sandtoft and once overhead Gamston turned onto that course. After about 5 mins I could see Sandtoft so I knew I was on course.

Once we had reached Sandtoft he directed me to Trent Falls where we would do the other exercises that are part of the Skills test, it was a bit of a blur so not sure what order they came in, but we did the three types of stall, clean, approach and final. We forced landing, which was quite interesting as I did it using a right hand circuit, which Christian said was harder, but it fealt easier for me.

We then went through steep turns... the first couple ended in spiral dives, but after a couple of goes I got the hang of them again. We did some slow flight and general handling and then headed back to Sheffield where I did a flapless landing.

The de-brief was a nightmare as he is such a perfectionist, but he did say if it had been the real thing then I would have passed so fingers crossed for the real thing.