JohnBurke

Buckle in.

Before we go further, this is the original question. Not what you can do at a major, not an introspection of character. Pure and simple: can you get hired at a REGIONAL with five prior failures during a practical test for a certificate or rating. The answer is YES. You can get hired at a regional with your background.

Having said that, some valid points have been raised, which I will address in turn. You are entry level. Your entry has not been good. Much in the same way that nobody really cares much about your gradeschool experience, however, there will come a time when you've put some distance and work experience behind you that the focus will be on what you're doing now, that counts, not what you did.

You'll always have checkride failures in your history. Your focus presently is on giving an employer something for comparison. You're going to build a better you.

You don't have it all to do over again, and this is a critical part of aviation: we can't fly into windshear, crash, and say that in hindsight, we'd have not done that. In aviation, judgement is everything. We all have challenges, and in our flying career, we're expected to manage our personal life as well as our career. This includes financial challenges, divorces, deaths in the family, setbacks, angry pets, constipation, tapeworms, trump, teenagers, and of course, days with the letter "r."

As a CFI, you understand the purpose of realistic distractions. It's not just a dropped pencil or pointing in the distance and barking "whatever can that be?" It's the ability to focus on flying despite whatever may crop up, to prioritize, and to persevere. Enough said.

I'm an employer: I'm listening to this story during your interview. I have a limited time to make a decision. First thing I want to hear is that you own it. You just told me that you don't. You disagree with the examiner. Interview over. If I give you a checkride, my decision is final; you will or won't get the job, and whether you disagree is irrelevant, because your opinion doesn't count. See how that works?

Your account needs to be simple: your short field landings weren't up to snuff. You got a discontinuance, and took another checkride and passed with flying colors. Moving on.

How you felt about the examiner is irrelevant. You struggled a bit on partial panel and retook the ride and passed. Do you see the trend here, what's important? You learned something, grew from the experience, and moved on. That's what I'm looking for here. Your immediate problem is that by having repeated failures, it shows a trend of NOT learning from the experience. You need to change that and change the perception of that.

Checkrides are a big deal in aviation. Your career is cumulative. Most job applications ask "have you ever," and you answer about things that have happened throughout your history; your FAA history is inclusive, and doesn't go away. Your only hope presently is to live an exemplary life: let the current you speak volumes for you, rather than your past errors having the loudest voice. Focus on going forward.

See previous comments regarding too much irrelevant information: this could be boiled down to situational awareness (and if your descent was into a traffic pattern, I'd question that act to begin with, especially in a training environment for traffic purposes, but also why one would raise the gear if you're landing anyway...I ask this rhetorically, because for the present, it's irrelevant).

Your comment here is more on track: you learned something and it's an error that you've never repeated because the lesson is so vivid for you. This is the takeaway, and the correct one.

Just take to heart the admonition of Roy Scheider in Blue Thunder: "you're new, you're young, you're supposed to be stupid, kid. Don't abuse it." It's a training environment. You're going to make mistakes. The focus is on whether you learn from those mistakes, are teachable, that you make corrections based on those mistakes, and don't repeat them. In this failure, you've done just that. (the larger question is why failures keep happening, which shows not learning, but we'll return to that. Life ain't over yet...don't let the dogpile of negativity overwhelm you just yet).

This sounds to me more like you hadn't learned to take a checkride, rather than you didn't know how to fly, teach, or had a deep seated deficiency. Your assessment is noted, however: you understand your deficiency and learned something. Whether you think it was fair is irrelevant. It's going to be assumed that any checkride busts are fair. Keep this in mind: the authority that gave you a checkride isn't on trial in an interview; their character or judgement will not be in question. Yours will be. The immediate question in the interviewers mind isn't the competency of those who gave the checkrides, especially if all your practical tests were given by different examiners: there's a consensus among the examiners by virtue of having had failures multiple times. If during a taste test five different people prefer pepsi over coke, it's quite different than one person tasting the same drink five times. You see the point?

The examiner isn't on trial. You are: every interview, every checkride is a kind of trial, in which the evidence you present is your performance weighed against the practical standards established for that test. In the case of a flight instructor practical test, the checkride has very little to do with your ability to fly, but to teach. From your statement, the examiner was looking for a bit more assertiveness. What I'd like to know is that you incorporated this lesson into your instructing and used it to become a better teacher. That's the takeaway.

It's not unacceptable because you have an instrument rating. It's unacceptable because you're supposed to be teaching it: that's the purpose of the checkride. Can you teach. Remember that you're setting the example, much like the captain in the cockpit. You're the standardizing pilot: you're the one passing on the information, the training, and that's what the checkride is checking.

In this case, you own it, which is good, but it's going to be assumed (or should be) that you own every one, because you must. The takeaway from this experience is that your briefing needed to be better, and having learned, you made it so.

This is the theme: show that you learned from your mistakes. Did I wear diapers until I was six and struggle with potty training? I don't know, but what the world really cares about is do I wear my big-boy pants now? Have I learned? Can I sit down on the bus without scaring away the other cattle? One hopes. The world runs on "what have you done for me lately," rather than tell me about your mom and pop. The question is not how your other five hundred landings were, but only your last one, because that's how your next landing will be judged. That last one will be the job you're doing now: be exemplary, be a shining rockstar that has come from a rough and shady past to become the posterchild for good, clean behavior.

I have a son who was an eagle scout. I just spent time with a captain who was originally hired because he was an eagle scout. It speaks to character, every bit as much as failures on one's past do, and when I say failures, I use a silent "f" which is pronounced phonetically as "l e a r n i n g e x p e r i e n c e s." See how that works? Did you have five failures that will haunt your career for life, or five learning experiences that will ultimately make you the right choice for the job?

In writing, we have a really overused expression: show, don't tell. You can tell me you've come a long way, but it will bore me and I'll be watching the blonde chick over your shoulder, or studying dead flies in the light fixtures. You can show me by your record that you create now, and you'll have my attention. How do you do that?

You mentioned becoming a checkairman. That's a powerful show.

Gold seal flight instructor: a lot of people have them, but much like your eagle scout, it's what the gold seal says about you. Instructors who have students who fail a lot are surrounded by mirrors; student failures say as much about the instructor as the student, and that brings me to one of my final points here: if you did all your training at ATP and continued to have failures, this says quite a bit about the training you were receiving: an instructor should NOT let a student go to a practical test, if the instructor isn't fully confident in the student. Your revelation about five checkride failures immediately sets an image in my mind of a bad training facility, and leaves a bad impression of the instruction received. This may or may not be true, but apply the same logic to your job: a gold seal is about a high pass rate, which is a stamp of approval on the degree to which you take your job as an instructor seriously. It's about focus, pride in the craftsmanship of the job: it's about being a professional.

Go for that check airman position. Seek after the gold seal. Be the guy that others want to give a letter of recommendation. Let your work speak for you. You can't change your prior checkrides, but you can determine that the here-and-now speaks well of you. Ensure you don't speak critically of former employers, check airmen, instructors: own your past and don't project it on others. Own your present, too.

You may be asked to brief an approach as part of an interview. Maybe you did fail a checkride for a briefing, or maybe it was a pretext for ending the checkride that day because you had other things going on. I don't know. I don't care. But today, in this interview, you give the best brief known to mankind and angry dachshund alike, when asked to brief an approach. Make that brief your *****. Own it, possess it, wear it like stink on a gorilla, and you'll impress me more with that than all the things you did in primary flight training combined.

Begin building a history of checkride passes, student passes, recommendations, accomplishments. You can't change the past, don't try. You can build the future. Do that. You had some rocky moments in training, persevered, and you're a learning machine, better at ever turn, teachable, professional, ready to go. That's the you that you need to sell. Sounds like you're already started building. Make it so, number one.