Check ride | Hanger Talk | Forum

I'm happy to say that I passed my private check ride yesterday.  It happened in unusual fashion, though  As far as I knew (it was my first ever checkride) everything had been going fairly normally until about halfway through the flight.  I flew to the first two checkpoints on my cross country, and then the examiner told me to divert.  On our way to the alternate airport I did steep turns.  Then, he asked me to do slow flight.  However, when I tried to pull the power back, it got stuck and would not come past about 1700 RPM.  Even with full flaps and carb heat on, the 180 hp engine in the C172 was still doing about 60 kts.  This is well above the dirty stall speed.  I did the "power off" stall with about 50% power as well.  The examiner tried to pull the power for a simulated emergency landing, but at 65 kts, which is best glide speed, we were holding level if not climbing.  With the check ride essentially completed, he pulled the mixture to cut off the engine on final and we had to get towed back to the FBO.