I had a 45 min. oral portion of the checkride with the DPE answering her questions on my flight planning preparation and Weight & Balance, aircraft systems, aviation charts and weather knowledge. After passing the knowledge portion of the checkride, I took off with the DPE in the Allegro 2000 LSA for the flight portion of the checkride.
I performed a short-field takeoff per DPE and headed towards the Asheboro airport (KHBI) with Causay airport as a visual checkpoint. After about 10 min. of flight, DPE asked me to point out the checkpoint and in the process, I lost about 280 ft and finally found the airport. The weather was hazzy and the new environment did not present many visual reference points. I was also nervous due to the checkride and being in a new setting since my home base is Raleigh-Exec Airport (KTTA). Zenda asked me to perform an emergency landing, as she brought the power to idle at 2,500 ft. I did the SPELL emergency checklist by setting the trim at the glide speed for Allegro 2000 at 70 mph, picking a landing spot as a nearby field, engine restart (simulation), let someone know (frequency, squawk) and headed towards it for landing. At final for the field, being high I performed a slip maneuver. She asked me to discontinue the landing at about 500 ft above ground and perform a go-around. But, I subsequently failed to clear the flight maneuvers portion bedeviled by my inability to maintain the assigned heading (90 degrees) just looking at the magnetic compass and without any outside reference point. Later Zenda pointed out that I could have switched on the GPS after the navigation portion of the checkride! My bad...She asked me to head toward the KBUY airport and perform a soft-field landing. I entered the left downwind for RWY 24 with full-flaps and performed a forward slip in the final and landed the airplane smoothly. The DPE complemented my landing but I still need to come back to correctly perform the flight maneuvers within the PTS margins. I plan to practice a couple of times with Jim and solo before embarkring on the checkride retest for the flight maneuvers portion...
