Alleviating Checkride Anxiety

Isabel Goyer

Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 11:18 PM ET

Verified

** Nervous about your checkride? Don't
be — At the end of the day, it's just another
flight.**

Key Takeaways:

Check ride anxiety is a universal experience for pilots, including seasoned instructors and examiners, as evaluation is a fundamental part of a pilot's responsibility to maintain standards.
To manage anxiety, trust your preparation and instructor's sign-off, prioritizing adequate rest and a calm mindset over intense last-minute studying.
Approach the check ride by focusing on meeting established standards rather than striving for perfection, remembering that examiners generally want you to succeed and view it simply as another flight.

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When I was getting ready for a check ride the other day, I mentioned to my primary instructor, Bill Ball, that I’d been nervous about it for the past day and a half. He nodded. After all, he’s a pilot too. It’s too easy to forget that that the person with the clipboard has to go through the same thing him or herself on a regular basis.

Bill is a senior instructor at SimCom and an FAA designated examiner. He has a couple of handfuls of type ratings and teaches in a few different airplanes. After it occurred to me that my instructor is the student sometimes too, I asked him how many check rides he’d taken.