Passed my FAA Commercial Airplane Multi-Engine Land (AMEL) Checkride today with Marc Nathanson at East Coast Aero Club. I flew Piper Seminole N852ND out of KBED.
Activities
We did the following activities based on the ACS:
- Aborted takeoff – Marc wanted to see me tell the tower afterwards, including the runway number
- Short field take off, 25 deg flaps, simulated engine failure above 500 ft. Almost let the heading get out of tolerance.
- Clearing turns (VERY important for Marc), steep turns (looking out the window), slow flight
- Power off stall in turn, power on stall, accelerated stall (slowing to 90 kts first)
- Vmc demo
- Engine failure while I was turning, using mixture. Restart procedure he did under my supervision. Marc wants to introduce people to a 2-person crew flight deck.
- Emergency descent (technically this isn’t required by ACS for adding AMEL to ASEL)
- Autopilot procedures including descent
- Single engine ILS 29 KBED, full stop
- Go around, normal touch and go (he helped with the reconfigure), short field landing over simulated 50′ obstacle. All landings at KBED
Feedback
Marc had the following post-flight feedback for me:
- Establish a rally point during your briefing that is away from the aircraft, taxiways, and other aircraft. Recommended the light post on the KBED West Ramp
- Follow the checklist! He did not like that my instructor recommended waiting to turn on the alternators after engine start in order to ensure they could pick up the load.
- Don’t use runway numbers on taxi call to ground. Could lead to an expectation bias. (Not sure if I agree with this if more than one runway is in operation and you want to tell ground which one you want to go to).
- Do the break check at idle speed.
- Review entered flight plan in Garmin 430 after loading an approach to ensure waypoints are correct
- Know the single engine rate of climb speed for every take off. He did not like my approach to figuring a conservative value based on 2000ft, 30F and just remembering that.
- Keep taxi speed < 15 kts
- Recommended not holding gear handles during extension/retraction. Instead hold throttles.