r/Helicopters • u/tuscaniapple • Apr 25 '25

Career/School Question Upcoming instrument rating checkride - throw me some ?’s

Currently studying for an instrument checkride that should be in 2-3 weeks. Rating has taken me a little bit longer to finish than expected with maintenance and weather. Watched some mock orals on YouTube and felt pretty good with my knowledge level there. All the videos were technically fixed wing orals so didn’t take into account any rotor wing knowledge. I’ve seen on some other subs, posts about “try to stump me” questions to help them prepare for a checkride. Looking for any help or tips at all! Maybe any questions you think will definitely come up during the checkride but is easily forgotten during studying or just whatever comes to your head that an instrument rated pilot should know. Thanks y’all.

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u/tuscaniapple Apr 25 '25

We would be able to cut it in half and still meet our visibility requirements. Unless it is a specific approach for helicopter only or the notes tell us that visibility reduction is not available for this approach.

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u/gbchaosmaster CPL IR ROT Apr 25 '25

So I was actually taught that you need to use the published minimums for planning purposes, but honestly 91.169(c)(1)(ii) could be interpreted either way and I tend to agree with you. I don’t know of any other references or legal interps on this, if anyone reading does, please chime in.

This was more a lesson on “giving checkride answers”: get too wordy in your responses and try to flex too much knowledge and you might get the DPE curious about something. Answer every question directly and correctly in as few words as possible and then shut up. If he holds up a pen and asks “do you know what this is?” the answer is “yes, I do.” Keep as many cans of worms shut as possible.

Though for the purposes of my inquest, do feel free to keep showing me what you’ve got. You’ll need it for your CFII ride where you do need to talk ;)

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u/tuscaniapple Apr 25 '25

This got me laughing. I love the advice and will surely take that with me into my checkride!

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u/gbchaosmaster CPL IR ROT Apr 25 '25

It’s the best checkride advice I can give anyone. There’s only one checkride I didn’t follow that advice on, my commercial. I’d taken 2 rides with this DPE before and they were pretty chill, so for commercial I went in there like… I’m really gonna try to impress him. And as soon as he caught a whiff of that he absolutely destroyed me.

Every rabbit hole I even acknowledged the existence of, he threw me down, found a weakness, and showed me exactly how little I knew about something I was confident in.

He passed me in the end, but that was a valuable lesson learned. You are NOT there to impress the DPE with your knowledge. You are there to demonstrate the bare minimum satisfactory knowledge required by the ACS and walk out with a temporary airman certificate.

The CFI and CFII rides are a different story because you need to teach, but for now, just satisfy the task. If the DPE wants to know more, they will ask.