Things started off badly the moment I got to the OPS room this morning. My aircraft was changed and when I did my preflight, I noticed that the baggage compartment catch was broken and it could not be locked. So after getting an instructor and an engineer to check it, they declared it unserviceable and it had to be sent to the hangar. I was assigned another one, after doing the preflight and the paperwork, the OPS personnel told me that there was no turnaround time between my sortie and the next. No prizes for guessing what happened next... I was swopped back to the original aircraft I had requested for and had to do the preflight and the paperwork all over again.

Anyone else would have kicked up a fuss but I decided to keep my cool. I had to rush through my calculations and weather briefing but managed to complete everything in time. However, due to some scheduling error, my P-Check instructor arrived 30 minutes after I was supposed to start.

We departed 45 minutes late in marginal weather and the conditions deteriorated further when I was doing circuits and it started getting bumpy. My performance could be better but I was safe and did not bust any tolerances. Though I must say I did strangely well for the flapless approach which I hardly practice. We left the circuit for the training area and I did steep turns, stalls and PFL. My steep turn to the right was good and I did not lose any height, but the ones to the left was quite horrible. I lost height but I stopped the turn and started over and only got it right after a couple more attempts. The stalls went quite well and my recoveries for the different types of stall were up to standard, just that I did not ease the nose down enough for some of them. My PFL was a real joke. I noted the wind direction correctly, selected a field and identified my high key and low key correctly. My procedures were good, made the correct judgements and would most certainly have made the field, except that when I got lower, I realized that the field I had selected had many small trees. They looked like dense vegetation from above! I went around at 600ft and returned to the aerodrome.

The rest of the check went well and I rejoined without much dramas. I was given instructions to join late downwind and had to do a glide approach. I could not lose the excess height and came in too high so I initiated a go around. I managed to do a good glide approach and it all ended well.

I did well enough to pass and I can finally move on to Phase 2! Despite all the cock-ups in the beginning, I was in a calm state of mind throughout. God delivered and ensured that the rest of the more important factors were in my favour. Glory to the Lord!