Jen passed her checkride yesterday and is now an officially licensed pilot! Yes, there is an absurdly high number of pilots in my group of friends. Then again, we are all aerospace engineers, so I suppose it’s me that’s unusual for not having one, instead of the other way around. We celebrated by sitting around Jen’s kitchen table and drinking and talking for three hours, which was a lot of fun. For once, we didn’t degrade into talk about the office, and instead spent the whole night laughing at funny stories about camping, reality TV, the various absurdities of our work gym and sports leagues, the rapidly growing number of women we know who are pregnant, and of course, flying.
Jen seems to have gotten a fairly normal examiner for her checkride. When I say “normal,” I really mean “not insane.” The examiner is a freaking superwoman — she flies in and wins aerobatic flying competitions, performs at airshows, is a captain for Southwest, and owns her own flying school specializing in aerobatics. But compared to stories from Jose’s and Byron’s checkrides, Jen’s examiner was downright boring.
Jose never got around to writing a blog entry about his own checkride, but he had a certifiably crazy examiner. The guy was flying in from College Station, and the first thing he did was enter the landing pattern at the Pearland airport going the wrong direction. Oops. That was only the beginning. He was wearing some kind of crazy sweatshirt with a howling wolf on it that said “Alpha Wolf.” When his laptop booted up, which happened often because it kept on crashing, it said “how may I serve you, master” in a sexy girl voice. He typed incessantly on his Blackberry, claiming he was taking notes. And then, when filling out some paperwork, he tore off Jose’s social security number and ate it. So that the Yankee government wouldn’t have it.
But it was Byron’s examiner that won the awesome quote contest. When he asked Byron what a group of orange traffic cones reminded him of, he mentioned that they look like psychadelic witches that have melted into the pavement. I can never look at traffic cones again without thinking about psychadelic witches melting.
I think I may need to learn to fly, just to get a good story.