Page 35 - Volume 20 Number 9

At the end of all this, we felt pretty well prepared for the oral portion of the check ride.
For the flying part, we were lucky to have Mike Freeman (thedeltapilot@gmail.com) a friend, local fellow CFI, and retired airline pilot who does a lot of insurance-approved light jet training, volunteer to be the flight instructor. Mike in turn was acquainted with Kevin Rothfus (kevin@rothfus.com), a DPE based out of Chino, California (CNO), and one of the very few on the West Coast authorized and current to give checkrides in a CJ. Because a DPE is generally required to administer checkrides only in his region, we needed to fly the CJ down to California from Washington State, but Mike somehow managed to get all of the required checkrides scheduled with Rothfus on a Saturday and Sunday, which made the logistics much easier.
And so with all this well organized, on a nice sunny spring morning, I take off in the CJ out of Bellingham, climb through 50 feet, call out “positive rate” and pull up the landing gear, and then hear one of the CJ2’s Williams F44 engines in the back start to spool down. The airplane feels like someone just applied the brakes and at the same time, it starts a right turn, all on its own. My conscious brain is urgently trying to figure out what happened when my left thigh muscles tighten spontaneously, pushing my foot on the left rudder down to the floor (it’s called a “neuromotor reflex”, and is
one of the goals of good training). Finally, after what seems like an hour, my brain kicks in with the brilliant cognitive observation “dead foot, dead engine”, and I think, “aha, it must be the right engine that instructor Freeman just pulled back”, and glance at the N2 gauges then the throttle quadrant to confirm this epiphany. Yep, I am right. Now all I have to do is maintain about a 10 degree nose up attitude, and airspeed at V2 until reaching 400 feet, which is where I can add 10 knots and pull up the flaps, then at 1,500 feet I can turn on the autopilot and relax a little.
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But, after passing 400 feet, I decide to use rudder trim not only to relieve some of the load on my aching leg, but also demonstrate just how truly sophisticated I am at this stuff. Big mistake! When reaching for the aft-facing rudder trim on the back of the center console, my brain does one of those mirror image things, which results in my right hand turning the knob in the opposite direction from that required; this not only increases the rudder pressure, but also puts the airplane even more out of trim than it was before. As this happens, I hear loud cat calls and raucous laughter from Tim and Roger, my two fellow-pilot, training-victim/buddies in the back seat who were clearly having way too much fun.
Finally, after several days of mutual airborne embarrassment, we all satisfactorily complete the flight training to Freeman’s satisfaction and on Friday evening fly the CJ down to CNO. At 0800 the next morning we are standing around the airplane on the ramp in the hot Chino sun when Rothfus shows up and in a very friendly fashion, introduces himself all around.