Luckily, I had good weather yesterday as well, and I was able to do a practice flight with an instructor first. I had wanted to do that because I hadn't flown in over a month, and I wanted to be sure that I wasn't rusty. The checkride itself was fairly easy, particularly since we finished the oral part of the test back on December 13^th, so all we had left was the flight portion. I arrived at 8:00 AM to preflight and pull the airplane out of the hangar, and we departed shortly after. After letting the engine warm up, doing a run-up, and getting our VFR clearance, we taxiied to Runway 23 and departed to the west for the Scituate practice area.

My first task was to navigate to my first waypoint on the cross-country flight to SYR, which was by the Scituate Reservoir. Once there, the examiner diverted me to HPN, which I accomplished using the Garmin GNS 430 GPS. Once on course, he had me demonstrate a departure stall, slow flight, steep turns, and lazy eights. The stall and slow flight went well, but I blew past my initial heading on my steep turn to the left, and picked up a little altitude on my steep turn to the right. Also, the second half of my lazy eight was better than the first, but he was satisfied with both. I've done better, but I hadn't practiced either in quite a while.

We then proceeded to SFZ for takeoffs and landings. My first landing was to be a power-off 180° accuracy landing... I have my good days and my bad days with those. I floated a bit past my touchdown point, but again, the examiner was satisfied, and his guidance from the FAA allows for a little leniency with overshooting but none with landing short. Next came a soft-field takeoff and landing, which both went well, followed by a short-field takeoff. After that, we departed the traffic pattern and went back out to the practice area to do eights on pylons (which was somewhat abbreviated... he only had me turn around one point instead of two), and we then returned to PVD. 1.3 hours of Hobbs time and some paperwork later, and I was a licensed commercial pilot.

All in all, it was a good flight, and I was probably the most relaxed I had ever been for a checkride, despite how long it took me to get there and how much I had been making of it beforehand. The oral wasn't bad either; his questions involved flight planning, weight and balance, commercial pilot privileges and limitations, aircraft systems, and V-speeds. It went pretty well, although I didn't study the V-speeds as well as I should have and managed to confuse some of them with other airplanes.

But now that I'm a commercial pilot, a lot of people wonder what that means. Well, according to 14 CFR § 61.133, I can fly for compensation or hire. But, since I only hold a category and class rating for single-engine land airplanes, I can only get a job flying single-engine airplanes until I get my multi-engine rating. For example, someone could pay me to ferry the Cessna 172 they just bought from across the country back to here, or I could fly skydivers all day in a Cessna 182, or tow banners in a Piper Pawnee, etc... all this assuming of course, that someone (i.e., their insurance company) would hire me with less than 300 hours.

Anyway, now that that's out of the way, I've begin my CFI training tomorrow at 8:00 AM. With the Fundamentals of Instruction (FOI) and CFI written tests out of the way, and plenty of right-seat time under my belt from last year, it shouldn't take too long. I'd like to get my CFI-I done, too, and hopefully soon after that I'll find a job instructing and finally start getting paid to do this, instead of the other way around. Once I've been doing that for a while, I'll get my commercial-multi add on at some point (and possibly my MEI) and see what jobs are available from there.