Pilot to Pilot

A Designated Pilot Examiner shares 5 tips to pass your checkride, plus the story of his engine failure and landing on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive at 3 PM on a Friday.
Johnny Ginley, a young DPE and fellow Ohio State aviation alum, explains what examiners see from the other side of the table. The advice applies to private, instrument, commercial, CFI, ATP, and type-rating checkrides. Many checkrides end before they even begin because of missing flight time, a bad endorsement, or aircraft paperwork that can't prove airworthiness.
In this episode:
Logbook mistakes that disqualify applicants, and why airlines still want clean logbooks years later
Proving airworthiness: inspections, ADs, and why a printed status sheet isn't enough
"Know your numbers": why cruising at 2,300 RPM needs a reason behind it
Don't force the flight: making a go/no-go call when the wind picks up on checkride day
Don't force the landing, and the one maneuver where a go-around now counts as unsatisfactory
Average checkride pass rates and how the ACS changed the CFI oral
The throttle cable failure that put Johnny on Lake Shore Drive, and how he got back in the cockpit afterward
Got a checkride coming up? Send this episode to someone who needs it. You can read Johnny's full article in Pilot to Pilot Magazine.
Pilot to Pilot Magazine
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Steve Giordano left a senior captain seat at Allegiant to build Nomadic Aviation Group, one of the most trusted ferry operations in the business. He breaks down how a ferry flight actually gets quoted and flown — lessors, permits, DARs, tankering fuel at $18 a gallon — what trips really cost, the margins behind them, and what he looks for when contracting pilots. Plus the Alice Springs COVID runs, Equatorial Africa thunderstorms, and the operational failure in Korea he still calls his worst.

Pilot to Pilot Magazine — Volume 003 is out now. Get yours at pilottopilothq.com/mag

Sponsors — please support the people who support the show:
• AeroTow — $100 off an AeroTow T2 for Pilot to Pilot listeners. Use promo code PILOT100 at amigoaerotow.com
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• Textron Aviation — Built for lifelong aviators. Plan your next chapter at txtav.com/stepup
• Garmin — Plan, file, fly, log with the Garmin Pilot app
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Nik Fialka has watched pilots lose the job before they ever sat down.

The Spitfire Elite coach and Ready 4 Pushback host joins us to walk through his ten rules for the airline interview — five things to do, five things that'll sink you.

The first one starts tonight, not the week your application gets picked up. Nik's habit: after shutdown, open your notes app and write down one thing that happened on that flight. The disagreement with your instructor. The divert. The passenger you went out of your way for. Do it for a year and you'll never be the candidate staring blankly when someone asks for a conflict story.

We get into paperwork nobody wants to think about until they need it, and why a gap you find today can take months to fix. Logbooks, too — Nik's line is that your logbook is your dissertation: you don't just present it, you defend it. Cover page, totals that add up, no white-out, addendums for the errors you find. As one airline logbook reviewer told him, don't make me pull out a calculator.

Then the other half. Why hiding or shading your data ends the interview faster than you'd believe. Why adding a previously undisclosed failure after you've been invited is a very different conversation than adding a new type rating. The pilot whose expunged record still got him fired for failure to disclose. And the one Nik is best known for — the candidate in a conference room full of finalists who dropped an F-bomb at the wrong moment and never made it to the logbook review.

The bigger point underneath all of it: from the second you leave your house, you're being interviewed. Be good to the Uber driver, the gate agent, the hotel desk. Jobs get won and lost when you least expect it.

Pilot to Pilot Magazine — Volume 003 is out now. Get yours at pilottopilothq.com/mag
Sponsors — please support the people who support the show: • NEW SPONSOR ALERT I'd like to welcome AeroTow to the Pilot to Pilot sponsors! check out their AeroTow T2 Engineered for easier maneuverability, the AeroTow T2 is versatile for a variety of aircraft. Its universal cradle provides a seamless towing experience ( Pilot to Pilot listeners can save $100 by using the code in the podcast!) Avemco Insurance — Save 5% as a Pilot to Pilot listener. Call (888) 635-4297 or visit avemco.com/4297-owner (owners) or avemco.com/4297-non-owner (non-owners) • Learn more about the exciting innovations at Textron Aviation today… just go to TXTAV.com • Garmin — Plan, file, fly, log with the Garmin Pilot app • Allworth Airline Advisors — Register for their latest webinar at allworthfinancial.com/justin • Allworth Financial - https://allworthfinancial.com/airlines/lp/runway-for-retirement-webinar?utm_campaign=airlines+-+more+runway+for+retirement?lmls=Partner+Channel&lmld=Pilot+to+Pilot&ad_version=Social

In 1999, a handful of people gathered at a dusty Namibian airfield to meet two men flying weight-shift microlights around the world. One of them was Mike Blyth. Watching from the crowd was a boy who had never left the country, whose family couldn't afford much flying, and who had no real concept of where these men had come from — only that whatever they were doing, he wanted to do it too.
Twenty-five years later, JP Schulze has flown around the world himself, built the first Sling High Wing off the line — designed by the same Mike Blyth — and become one of the most distinctive filmmakers in aviation.
This one took a while to make happen. We finally met at Oshkosh this year, and JP is candid about being a naturally shy person who ended up with a career in front of a camera.
He grew up in Namibia with no art classes and no creative outlets, thinking in German and Afrikaans, teaching himself English from the Discovery Channel at eight years old. He was taking the controls of his dad's microlight at ten. He funded his first licence by free-diving for crayfish, selling snake venom, and restringing tennis rackets.
The around-the-world trip nearly didn't happen twice. Sponsors walked after a Cirrus ditched near Hawaii and the CAPS pull ran on every news channel — nobody wanted their logo on a small plane over an ocean. So JP and Louis Cole self-funded it, and JP is honest about what that cost: the fourteen-hour legs, the multi-hour shouting match somewhere between Fiji and Kiribati, and the weight of being responsible for a non-pilot's life for the first time.
In this episode:
Meeting Mike Blyth in 1999 — and building his airplane twenty years later
Growing up flying "sketchy" weight-shift trikes over the African bush
Why Southern Africa has a GA scene almost nobody expects
Moving to New Zealand at seventeen and rebuilding from scratch in a third language
Meeting Louis Cole on a sand dune and having his life change in a day
Signing with Discovery, then watching the money disappear
What flying around the world actually took — and why he'd do it again
Insisting on being the first to build the Sling High Wing, then helping write the manual
Why he refuses to post weekly, and what that has cost him
The sunglasses he built because a $350 pair costs $10 to make
Why print still matters, and what we both think is at stake
We also recorded a second conversation about the around-the-world flight itself — that one is exclusive to the magazine, with the audio released free a year after publication.
Happy Flying,
Justin
Support JP - otavi.co best sunglasses for pilots
Pilot to Pilot Magazine — Volume 003 is out now. Get yours at pilottopilothq.com/mag
Sponsors — please support the people who support the show: • NEW SPONSOR ALERT I'd like to welcome AeroTow to the Pilot to Pilot sponsors! check out their AeroTow T2 Engineered for easier maneuverability, the AeroTow T2 is versatile for a variety of aircraft. Its universal cradle provides a seamless towing experience ( Pilot to Pilot listeners can save $100 by using the code in the podcast!) Avemco Insurance — Save 5% as a Pilot to Pilot listener. Call (888) 635-4297 or visit avemco.com/4297-owner (owners) or avemco.com/4297-non-owner (non-owners) • Learn more about the exciting innovations at Textron Aviation today… just go to TXTAV.com • Garmin — Plan, file, fly, log with the Garmin Pilot app • Allworth Airline Advisors — Register for their latest webinar at allworthfinancial.com/justin • Allworth Financial - https://allworthfinancial.com/airlines/lp/runway-for-retirement-webinar?utm_campaign=airlines+-+more+runway+for+retirement?lmls=Partner+Channel&lmld=Pilot+to+Pilot&ad_version=Social

Mark Woglom has bought and sold roughly a dozen airplanes in twenty-five years — a new Cessna 182 he learned to fly in, a Baron he never got comfortable in, a pressurized 414, a Cheyenne II XL, four separate Cirrus SR22s, a Vision Jet, a TBM 960, a Citation M2, and the CJ3+ he flies today. Six weeks ago he added an Icon A5, because you can't go sightseeing in a jet.
Along the way he built a framework for making the decision the rest of us agonize over.
In this episode we cover:
The three F's — finances, features, and function — and why mission is the one most buyers skip
The "fourth F": buying the wrong airplane, and how to avoid it
Why he never trusts manufacturer range claims, broker enthusiasm, or forum consensus
His normalized fuel reserve method for comparing aircraft honestly, apples to apples
Real rules of thumb for insurance, capital cost, maintenance, and the ancillary costs that ambush new owners
Why he took a five-year break from flying while still owning an airplane
What changed when he decided to earn a type rating in his mid-fifties
Why his wife's headset ended a turboprop purchase
Never get plane poor — and why a fuel stop isn't the end of the world
Whether you're saving toward your first 172 or wondering whether the step up is worth it, this one's a masterclass in buying with your head instead of your heart.
Happy Flying,
Justin
Pilot to Pilot Magazine — Volume 003 is out now. Get yours at pilottopilothq.com/mag
Sponsors — please support the people who support the show: • NEW SPONSOR ALERT I'd like to welcome AeroTow to the Pilot to Pilot sponsors! check out their AeroTow T2 Engineered for easier maneuverability, the AeroTow T2 is versatile for a variety of aircraft. Its universal cradle provides a seamless towing experience ( Pilot to Pilot listeners can save $100 by using the code in the podcast!) Avemco Insurance — Save 5% as a Pilot to Pilot listener. Call (888) 635-4297 or visit avemco.com/4297-owner (owners) or avemco.com/4297-non-owner (non-owners) • Learn more about the exciting innovations at Textron Aviation today… just go to TXTAV.com • Garmin — Plan, file, fly, log with the Garmin Pilot app • Allworth Airline Advisors — Register for their latest webinar at allworthfinancial.com/justin • Allworth Financial - https://allworthfinancial.com/airlines/lp/runway-for-retirement-webinar?utm_campaign=airlines+-+more+runway+for+retirement?lmls=Partner+Channel&lmld=Pilot+to+Pilot&ad_version=Social