Things I Learned on my CFII Checkride

During my CFII checkride I learned about many new things I’ve never heard about. Here are some of them that stood out:

The eCFR has links to the amendments in the Federal Register to easily allow you to determine the background information for any regulation. For example, if you go to 14 CFR 91.123, you can scroll to the bottom and see that in the note it says the last revision was Sept 29, 1995. By clicking the hyperlink, you can “View Document” which takes you to the Federal Register. Under “Document Details”, click “PDF” to go directly to the page in the Federal Register with all the background for that amendment. Inside, you can see background relating to why the regulation was implemented, discussions of comments from people/organizations within the industry such as AOPA, ATCA, ATA, NATCA, ALPA, and more. In some cases, you can see information on how the FAA has authority to implement these changes without congressional approval.

The other component to that, which we addressed under “methods of revision” within the CFII PTS (Practical Test Standards) Area of Operation II Task C was 14 CFR Part 11:

The purpose of this regulation is to specify how the FAA makes changes to the regulations. 14 CFR 11.25 specifies the types of documents that the FAA may issue when incorporating a new rule, and who they may contact as a result of the rules being issued, as well as where the rules can be found by the public (the Federal Register). There’s many other components to Part 11 so it’s worth reading yourself! It even says how you can leave comments on proposals and final rules that request them.

The next thing I learned is specific to instrument flight, but I learned about the Terminal Procedure Publication’s Change Notice:

This is a document released every 28 days, in-between the 56 day revision cycle of the Terminal Procedure Publication, which lists any changes that occurred between the releases. This allows an approach to be created, published, and flown before the next iteration of the TPP is published!

I also learned that RAIM status can be checked online via this FAA website. Similarly, WAAS status can be checked via this one.

Moving on to the last thing I will mention regarding flight planning:

When I was performing the calculations for the cross country flight plan that he had given me a scenario for, he made an excellent point. The climb charts provided by the manufacturer often assume certain conditions. For the case of the aircraft I was flying, the Piper Seminole (PA-44-180), it assumes a zero wind condition. In the real world, however, we have wind. The chart provides time to climb, fuel burn in the climb, and distance taken to make the climb. Of these three criteria, only one is significantly impacted by wind: distance. As such, the point he made was that you can use the chart to determine fuel burn and time to climb, but then use your computed ground speed (and some math/your E6B) to determine your distance to climb! I think this is actually quite an excellent idea that I had never thought of doing, yet makes a ton of sense. I’d encourage anyone who wants to have extremely accurate climb charts (or impress a DPE) to consider trying this method out.

Those were the major things that I learned that I’ll be taking with me in the rest of my career. Hopefully you can learn something from it too!