A checkride is the FAA practical test: one continuous examination, in two halves, that decides whether you are issued a pilot certificate. The first half is an oral examination on the ground. The second half is a flight in which you are asked to demonstrate the manoeuvres and the judgement the certificate requires. It is conducted against the Airman Certification Standards by a Designated Pilot Examiner or, less often, by an FAA inspector, and it usually takes most of a day. This page explains what actually happens, what is being assessed, why candidates turn up unready, and what a discontinuance or a disapproval really means — because those two words cause more unnecessary fear than anything else in flight training.
Who The Examiner Is
Most checkrides are conducted by a Designated Pilot Examiner. A DPE is not an FAA employee. They are an experienced pilot and instructor whom the FAA has designated to conduct practical tests on its behalf, and you pay them directly — the examiner's fee is a third-party cost, separate from anything you pay a flight school, and it is charged again if you have to retest. Some tests are conducted by an FAA Aviation Safety Inspector at a Flight Standards District Office instead, at no charge, but availability is limited and most applicants go to a DPE.
Two practical consequences follow from this. The first is scheduling: examiners are individuals with their own calendars, and in a busy region the wait for a slot can be meaningful. Book the examiner well before you are finished rather than after, and keep flying while you wait — arriving at a checkride three weeks out of practice is how a well-prepared candidate fails and buys a second fee. The second is tone. A DPE is not trying to catch you out. Their job is to establish whether you meet a published standard, and a great many of them will tell you, at the start, exactly how the day is going to run.
You will find pass-rate figures quoted all over the internet. We do not publish one, because the only rate that predicts your day is how consistently you have flown the required manoeuvres to standard in the fortnight beforehand, and your instructor already knows that number.
What Is Actually Being Assessed
The practical test is built from the Airman Certification Standards, the FAA document that defines the test for each certificate and rating. The ACS divides the test into Areas of Operation — preflight preparation, airport operations, takeoffs and landings, navigation, slow flight and stalls, emergency operations, and so on — and each Area of Operation contains Tasks. Every Task is written out in three kinds of element, and knowing which is which is the single most useful thing you can understand before test day.
| Element | What The Examiner Is Establishing | What It Looks Like On The Day |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge | That you understand the rule, the system or the principle underneath the action, not just the action | A direct question: what this symbol means, what this system does when it fails, what the regulation requires of you |
| Risk Management | That you can spot a hazard, judge how much it matters, and say what you would do about it | A scenario: the ceiling is lower than forecast and your passenger has a flight to catch — talk me through it |
| Skills | That you can fly the manoeuvre inside the tolerances printed in the standards, and recognise when you are drifting outside them | Flown, not asked. The examiner sets it up, watches, and says very little |
The specific tolerances — the altitude, heading and airspeed limits attached to each Task — are printed in the ACS, and they are revised from edition to edition. Get the current edition for your certificate from your instructor and work to the one that applies on your test date rather than to a figure someone quoted you. If a requirement matters to your plan and you are not certain of it, ask your instructor to show you where it is written rather than taking anyone's word for it, including ours.
The Oral: How It Really Goes
The oral is not a quiz. Most examiners build it around a single spine: a cross-country flight they asked you to plan, usually assigned a day or two beforehand, to somewhere you have not flown. You bring the completed plan, and the examiner walks through it with you — which is a very efficient way of reaching almost every knowledge area at once. Explaining your route reaches airspace. Explaining your fuel reserve reaches performance, weight and balance, and regulation. Explaining why you chose that altitude reaches weather, terrain and oxygen rules. Explaining what you would do if the forecast changed reaches risk management, which is where most of the real assessment happens.
Expect the questioning to stop when the examiner is satisfied rather than when a list is exhausted. Expect "I don't know, but here is where I would look it up" to be an acceptable answer when it is true and you then find it — that is a demonstration of a real pilot skill. Expect not to be allowed to bluff. And expect the eligibility and paperwork check to come first, before any of it, because there is no point examining an applicant who is not eligible.
The stage-by-stage shape of the whole day, with typical durations for each phase, is tabled on our private pilot license requirements page. What follows here is what goes wrong.
What To Have With You
Almost every checkride that ends before the airplane is untied ends on paperwork. The list below is the working version; your instructor will confirm the current requirements for your test, and the examiner may ask for something specific to their own procedure.
| Item | Why It Is Needed |
|---|---|
| Government-issued photo identification | Establishes who you are and your date of birth before anything else happens |
| Your student pilot certificate, or the pilot certificate you already hold | Establishes what you are currently permitted to do |
| Your medical certificate | Part of eligibility; an expired medical ends the day immediately |
| Logbook with every required endorsement | Proof of the aeronautical experience and the training endorsements the certificate requires, including the recent test-preparation training |
| Knowledge test report | Proof you passed the written, and the source of the subject codes the examiner must question you on |
| Completed and signed IACRA application, and your FTN | The application itself; the examiner cannot issue a certificate without it |
| Aircraft airworthiness certificate and registration | The airplane has to be legal to fly before you can be tested in it |
| POH or AFM, with current weight and balance data | You will be asked to compute performance and loading from it |
| Aircraft maintenance records | You must be able to show the required inspections are current — a missing entry is the most avoidable failure there is |
| The assigned cross-country plan, with current charts | It is the spine of the oral and the first leg of the flight |
| Headset, view-limiting device and flight computer | Working equipment for the instrument-reference and navigation Tasks |
| The examiner's fee, in the form they specified | Paid directly to the examiner; confirm the method when you book, not on the morning |
The aircraft records deserve emphasis because they are the one item on the list that is not about you. If you are training at a school, ask well in advance who brings them and check that the inspections are current for the date of your test. Applying for the certificate itself is done in IACRA, and if that system is unfamiliar our guide to the IACRA student pilot certificate application covers the account, the FTN and the errors that get applications kicked back.
Why Candidates Turn Up Not Ready
In our experience the reasons cluster, and almost none of them are about flying ability.
- A paperwork defect. An expired medical, a missing endorsement, an IACRA application that was never submitted, or aircraft records that are not current. All of it is checkable a week ahead and almost none of it is checked a week ahead.
- A stale knowledge test. The FAA knowledge test result expires 24 calendar months after the month it was taken. Students who sit the written early and then train slowly can run out of window. Our page on the private pilot written exam explains when to take it and how long the result lasts.
- A gap before the test. Three weeks of not flying while waiting for an examiner slot undoes more than most people believe. Keep flying, and use the simulator between flights if the weather or the schedule is against you.
- Weak weather and airspace knowledge. These are the two areas where a candidate who can fly beautifully most often comes apart, because they are learned from books and not from the airplane.
- Thin risk-management answers. "I would not fly" is not automatically the right answer, and neither is "I would go and see." The examiner wants to hear you weigh something.
- Manoeuvres that are good on average. A steep turn that is inside standards four times out of five is not ready. Consistency, not best-day performance, is what the standards measure.
Not sure where you stand against the standards? Bring your logbook to a free consultation and we will tell you honestly what is left between you and a checkride.
The Three Ways The Day Can End
This is the part nobody explains properly, and it is the part that keeps people awake. A practical test has exactly three outcomes, and only one of them is a failure.
| Outcome | What The Examiner Issues | What Happens To What You Completed | What You Need Before You Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pass | A temporary airman certificate, issued through IACRA at the end of the debrief | Nothing outstanding — the test is complete | Nothing. The plastic certificate follows by post |
| Discontinuance | A Letter of Discontinuance | Credit is retained for the Tasks already completed satisfactorily | A new appointment to finish the remaining Tasks. The letter states the period in which that must happen — read it and confirm the date with your examiner |
| Disapproval | A Notice of Disapproval listing the Tasks that were unsatisfactory | The notice records what you completed satisfactorily as well as what you did not | Additional training and an instructor endorsement stating you are competent to pass, a new appointment, and the examiner's fee again |
A discontinuance is not a failure and does not appear as one. It happens when the test cannot be completed for a reason that is not your performance: the weather closes in partway through, the airplane develops a squawk, the examiner runs out of daylight, or an outside event interrupts the day. In Los Angeles the most common cause is weather — a June morning where the marine layer has not lifted by the time the oral finishes. You go home with the oral behind you and come back for the flight.
A disapproval is the one people mean when they say "failed the checkride." You receive a notice listing the Tasks that were unsatisfactory. You then need additional training in those areas and an endorsement from an authorized instructor before you can retest. The retest normally covers the unsatisfactory Tasks and anything that was not completed, but the examiner sets the scope, so confirm it with them and with your instructor when you rebook rather than assuming. A disapproval on a first attempt is far more common than the confident people on the internet let on. It costs you time, a second fee and some pride. It does not cost you the certificate.
A Checkride Out Of Van Nuys
Where you take the test shapes what the flight looks like. Van Nuys Airport is a towered Class D field underneath the Los Angeles Class B shelf, which means three things for a candidate. Radio work is examined in a live environment rather than a quiet one, so the applicant who has been talking to a tower since lesson one has an ordinary day and the applicant who has not does not. Airspace questions in the oral are concrete, because the airspace in question is the airspace over your head. And the practice areas are close enough that the flight portion does not spend its first twenty minutes in transit.
The diversion — the moment the examiner closes your plan and sends you somewhere unplanned — is realistic from here, because there are fields in several directions within a short leg: Whiteman at the north-east corner of the Valley, Camarillo out to the west, Santa Paula beyond it. Knowing the geography north and west of the Valley cold is worth more than any amount of extra pattern work.
The local scheduling advice is simple. Avoid a mid-morning slot in May and June, when the marine layer is the most likely cause of a discontinuance. Avoid a summer afternoon, when density altitude blunts climb performance and the air over the Valley floor gets rough enough to make a steep turn harder than it needs to be. Early morning outside marine-layer season, or the second half of the afternoon in winter, is the friendliest window. How we handle weather on the day, including rebooking, is on our weather and cancellation policy page, and what the field, the airspace and the traffic pattern are actually like is on flight training at Van Nuys Airport.
How Instrument And Commercial Checkrides Differ
The structure is identical every time — eligibility, oral, flight, debrief, one of three outcomes — but the weight shifts.
| Test | What The Oral Leans On | What The Flight Is Mostly |
|---|---|---|
| Private pilot | Airspace, weather products, aircraft systems, and the cross-country you were told to plan together with the decisions inside it | Airwork, ground reference manoeuvres, a diversion, emergency procedures, and several kinds of takeoff and landing |
| Instrument rating | Regulations and currency, approach charts and minimums, alternates, required equipment, and a great deal more weather | Instrument approaches, holding, partial panel and a missed approach, flown under a hood or in actual conditions |
| Commercial pilot | Commercial privileges and limitations — the regulatory boundary around flying for compensation — plus systems and performance in more depth | Precision manoeuvres: chandelles, lazy eights, eights on pylons, steep spirals, and accuracy landings |
The exact Tasks for each are listed in the ACS for that certificate or rating, which again is the document to work from rather than a summary. The instrument test is the one where a simulator pays for itself before the checkride, because approaches and holds respond to repetition better than almost anything else in flying; details are on our instrument rating in Los Angeles page. The commercial test is the one governed less by the manoeuvres than by the 250 total flight hours the FAA requires to be eligible at all, which is covered on the commercial pilot license in Los Angeles page.
The Fortnight Before
Fly. Not new material — the Tasks you already know, flown to standard, repeatedly, with the examiner's list in front of you. Get the paperwork checked by someone who is not you. Plan two or three cross-countries you have never flown and brief them out loud to your instructor as though they were the assigned one. Read the current standards for your certificate end to end, once, slowly. And sleep the night before, which is easier if you have understood the three outcomes above and accepted that the worst realistic version of the day costs you a few weeks and a fee.
Everything upstream of this — the medical, the student pilot certificate, the written, the logbook and currency — is laid out in order on our student pilot resources page, and the full structure of the certificate itself is on private pilot license in Los Angeles.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is A Checkride?
A checkride is the FAA practical test: one continuous examination, in two halves, that decides whether you are issued a pilot certificate. The first half is an oral examination on the ground. The second half is a flight in which you are asked to demonstrate the manoeuvres and the judgement the certificate requires.
Who Conducts The Checkride?
Most checkrides are conducted by a Designated Pilot Examiner. A DPE is not an FAA employee. They are an experienced pilot and instructor whom the FAA has designated to conduct practical tests on its behalf, and you pay them directly. Some tests are conducted by an FAA Aviation Safety Inspector instead, at no charge, but availability is limited.
What Is The Difference Between A Discontinuance And A Failure?
A discontinuance is not a failure and does not appear as one. It happens when the test cannot be completed for a reason that is not your performance: the weather closes in partway through, the airplane develops a squawk, the examiner runs out of daylight, or an outside event interrupts the day. A disapproval is the one people mean when they say "failed the checkride."
What Happens If I Fail My Checkride?
You receive a notice listing the Tasks that were unsatisfactory. You then need additional training in those areas and an endorsement from an authorized instructor before you can retest. The retest normally covers the unsatisfactory Tasks and anything that was not completed, but the examiner sets the scope, so confirm it with them and with your instructor when you rebook rather than assuming.
How Long Does A Checkride Take?
It is conducted against the Airman Certification Standards by a Designated Pilot Examiner or, less often, by an FAA inspector, and it usually takes most of a day. Expect the questioning to stop when the examiner is satisfied rather than when a list is exhausted.
What Should I Bring To A Checkride?
Almost every checkride that ends before the airplane is untied ends on paperwork. Bring government-issued photo identification, your student pilot or existing pilot certificate, your medical certificate, your logbook with every required endorsement, your knowledge test report, the completed and signed IACRA application, the aircraft airworthiness certificate and registration, the POH with current weight and balance data, the aircraft maintenance records, the assigned cross-country plan with current charts, your headset and view-limiting device, and the examiner's fee.
What Is The Most Common Reason Candidates Are Not Ready?
A paperwork defect. An expired medical, a missing endorsement, an IACRA application that was never submitted, or aircraft records that are not current. All of it is checkable a week ahead and almost none of it is checked a week ahead.
Get Ready For Yours
If you are close to a checkride and want an honest read on where you stand, book a free consultation and bring your logbook — it takes about half an hour and costs nothing. If you have not started yet and you are reading this out of curiosity about where the process ends, the beginning is one hour in the left seat of a real airplane at Van Nuys. A discovery flight is $229 and that is the total: no tax, no booking fee.
Book A Discovery Flight — $229 Book A Free Consultation Call (818) 330-1318
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