About 4 months after my first loggable flight back in January, as of today I am a licensed private pilot! I showed up at the Boeing Field today around noon to have my instructor go over the checklist of stuff that I needed to have with me for the examiner to review. We had that good to go by the time the examiner showed up.
The first task with the examiner was a 1.5 hour oral exam (no, not like at the dentist–think more like technical interview). After I finished that, we re-checked the weather forecast since the printed weather that I had brought with me for the interview indicated that the clouds in the area were all too low to do some of the required practice maneuvers. The text weather that we could find still wasn’t good enough, but there was some indication that there may be some blue sky to be found somewhere, so I called the Seattle Flight Service Station to talk to a weather briefer. He took a look at the current satellite pictures and found what looked like a nice big break in the clouds up by Paine Field in Everett. I chose to give the flight a try, and was admonished by the examiner that if the weather started getting bad, it had better be me and not her that called the flight back to our starting airport.
We finished up all of the required maneuvers and headed back to Boeing Field, and for the first time during the entire process, I began to wonder if I was going to pass. It started off with what would have been a couple of straightforward special-purpose landings (short field landing and soft field landing), but the crosswind was pretty strong, and Seattle usually doesn’t have much wind, let alone crosswinds, so I hadn’t done much crosswind practice. Trying to dust off my 1337 cr0ssw1nd ski11z while at the same time performing special landings resulted in a somewhat sloppy show. She considered the specialty part of the landings fine, but after taking off from the last one, she asked "do you know how to do crosswind landings?" I sheepishly repleid "yeah." She said "well, I haven’t seen one yet today, show me one so we can call this done." If that wasn’t a challenge to my piloting skill, nothing was. It took me one extra approach, but I finally did set down in what was a pretty good plain ol’ crosswind landing. We taxied back to parking, and before I could push the airplane back into its parking spot, she said "unless you completely mess up during parking, congratulations, you’re a pilot."
[Edit: changing the category to something better than MSN's silly default.]