FAA Commercial Pilot common mistakes
FAA Commercial Pilot · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Recites performance and weight-and-balance numbers from memory or reads them off an EFB app, but cannot work the POH/AFM charts in front of the examiner - and cannot state the conditions those numbers assume (pressure altitude, temperature, wind, runway slope/surface, flaps).
Training apps and dispatch software hand back a single number, so the candidate never learns how to interpolate the chart or what the chart's baseline conditions are. The result is a correct-looking answer that collapses the moment the examiner changes one variable.
What to do instead
Before every training flight, compute takeoff/landing distance and W&B by hand from the POH, then check the app. Be able to say out loud: which chart, which entry values, which interpolation, and which real-world factors (wind, slope, contamination, pilot technique) the book numbers do NOT include. In the oral, do the calculation live rather than quoting a figure.
Cannot walk through the aircraft's systems or airworthiness status: no coherent explanation of the constant-speed propeller, fuel system, electrical/vacuum system, or of what legally makes the aircraft airworthy (required inspections, ADs, equipment list, inoperative-equipment deferral).
Candidates learn the preflight flow as a sequence of physical actions and never build a mental model of how the systems work, so questions phrased as 'why' or 'what if' have nowhere to land.
What to do instead
Draw the systems from memory on a whiteboard (fuel: tanks → selector → strainer → pump → servo; electrical: bus → alternator → regulator → battery) and trace a failure through each. For airworthiness, be able to name where you find required inspections, AD compliance, and the procedure for deferring an inoperative item, and show the actual entries in the aircraft records.
Performs the preflight inspection as a ritual walk-around - touching items in order without being able to state the purpose of each - and skips or short-cuts the items that actually catch problems: draining every fuel sump (including the ones that are inconvenient), checking tire and brake condition, verifying documents and required equipment on board, and checking control surfaces for full travel and security.
The inspection is memorized as a path around the airplane rather than as a set of questions ('what would I see if this were wrong?'). Under checkride stress, ritual items with no attached meaning get dropped.
What to do instead
Rebuild the walk-around as a purpose-driven checklist: for each item, say the failure it detects. Physically sample all sumps and look at what comes out. Rehearse it out loud on an aircraft you are not about to fly so the words, not the muscle memory, carry the inspection.
Poor surface positional awareness on taxi: accepting a 'hold short' instruction without a full readback including call sign and runway, drifting past the hold short line while heads-down with the checklist, taking the wrong taxiway at a complex intersection, or failing to stop and orient after landing and before taxiing clear.
Candidates treat taxi as downtime for checklists and radios, and unfamiliar airports give no visual anchors. Runway incursions are almost always attention-management failures, not knowledge failures.
What to do instead
Brief the taxi route before rolling (diagram it if the airport is complex), read back all hold short instructions verbatim with call sign, stop the aircraft before doing anything heads-down, and use an explicit runway-crossing challenge-and-response with yourself or the other pilot.
Continues an unstable approach to touchdown rather than going around - too fast, too high, misaligned, or ballooning/porpoising after a bounced touchdown - and has no pre-briefed point on final at which the go-around is mandatory.
The candidate is flying to pass rather than flying to land, and a go-around feels like an admission of failure. Without a numeric gate (altitude, airspeed, alignment, sink rate), the decision defaults to 'keep trying'.
What to do instead
Define stabilized-approach criteria before takeoff (e.g., on speed and on centerline by a set altitude, no more than a specified correction needed) and brief the go-around gate out loud. Practise full-stop go-arounds from 50 ft and from the flare so the response is automatic. On a bounced landing, fly the go-around unless the aircraft is firmly on the ground with runway remaining.
Commercial maneuvers flown to private-pilot standards: entering steep turns, chandelles, lazy eights, or eights on pylons without clearing turns and without the correct entry setup (configuration, power, pitch, bank), then blowing through the ACS altitude, airspeed, bank, or rollout tolerances - or rolling into the maneuver while still looking inside the cockpit.
The candidate focuses on the shape of the maneuver and not on the entry conditions and outside references, so the maneuver is 'recovered' rather than flown, and tolerances are exceeded in the last few seconds.
What to do instead
Standardize every entry with the same spoken sequence: clearing turns both directions, configuration, power, entry pitch/airspeed, bank, then outside reference. Debrief each maneuver against the specific ACS tolerances (altitude, airspeed, bank, heading, rollout) instead of a general impression, and repeat the maneuver until it is inside tolerance three times running.
Navigation and flight planning that depend on the moving map: cannot produce a dead-reckoning or pilotage leg by hand, cannot compute a wind-correction or fuel burn for a diversion in the air, and does not build the required fuel reserve into the plan or verify it in flight.
GPS removes the need to practise the underlying arithmetic, so the skill atrophies. Candidates also copy a fuel figure from the app without knowing which regulatory reserve it does or does not include.
What to do instead
Plan at least one cross-country per week entirely by hand (true course → variation → deviation → wind → heading, plus time, fuel, and checkpoints), then fly it and compare against the GPS. Be able to state the applicable VFR/IFR fuel reserve rules from memory and show, in flight, how the remaining fuel compares with the reserve at each checkpoint.
Failure to recognize an impending stall or to recover cleanly: slow flight held with the stall warning screaming and altitude wandering, no clearing turns, stalls recovered with aileron and insufficient rudder, a secondary stall during the recovery, or excessive altitude loss because the recovery is begun only after the break.
Candidates are taught to 'do the stall' rather than to recognize the cues (buffet, horn, mushiness, decreasing control effectiveness) and apply a memorized recovery flow. Under pressure they hold the back pressure and add aileron, which is the opposite of the fix.
What to do instead
Practise slow flight with the specific goal of holding a heading, altitude, and airspeed while the horn sounds, then practise power-off and power-on stall recoveries with a spoken flow: reduce angle of attack, level the wings with rudder, add power as appropriate, and reconfigure only after the wing is flying. Fly several recoveries from the first indication rather than from the break.
High-altitude knowledge that is recited but not applied: cannot state the supplemental oxygen requirements by altitude and duration, cannot describe time of useful consciousness at typical jet altitudes, has no plan for a rapid decompression or pressurization failure, and does not know what is required for flight in Class A airspace or for the aircraft's high-altitude endorsement.
High-altitude material is studied as regulations to memorize, and most candidates train in normally aspirated aircraft where none of it is ever experienced, so there is no mental image to attach it to.
What to do instead
Learn the oxygen rules as a short table (who, what altitude, how long) and rehearse them aloud. Brief a rapid-decompression scenario: don oxygen first, then emergency descent, then checklist. Be able to explain what happens to true airspeed, indicated airspeed, and stall margin as altitude increases, and know exactly what airspace, equipment, and endorsements your planned flight requires.
Emergencies handled by memory dump rather than by procedure: no immediate-action memory items for engine failure in flight, no discipline about establishing best glide and a landing site before troubleshooting, forgets to switch tanks/check the boost pump on a fuel-related power loss, and either freezes on the checklist or buries the nose in it while flying.
Emergency training is often done as a demonstration in cruise flight with the examiner prompting. Without a fixed priority order - fly the aircraft, then memory items, then checklist - the candidate's attention goes to the problem instead of the airplane.
What to do instead
Memorize and rehearse the priority sequence out loud (maintain control and best glide, pick a field, then memory items, then checklist). Practise the drill from unusual attitudes and at low altitude, and practise delegating the checklist to the other pilot or reading it only after the aircraft is trimmed and the field is selected.
Multiengine handling that reveals the single-engine airplane mindset: Vmc demonstration flown without the correct entry conditions and recovery, no coherent 'identify–verify–feather' sequence, failure to reduce drag and set best single-engine climb speed, and no real grasp of the single-engine service ceiling and climb-performance penalty for the actual weight, altitude, and temperature.
The candidate has not internalized that asymmetric flight is a drag and control problem, not just an engine problem, and has practised the drill only in cool, light conditions at low altitude where the margins hide the errors.
What to do instead
Rehearse the engine-failure flow until it is automatic: maintain control, identify and verify the failed engine, feather it, clean up drag, set best single-engine climb speed, then run the checklist - and be able to explain which factors raise or lower Vmc (for example higher density altitude and higher power). Compute single-engine climb performance from the chart for today's conditions and brief what you will do if it is negative.