Four Final Days: How to Prep for a Sim Assessment or Checkride
A sim assessment is an employer’s hiring tool, scored on crew cooperation and trainability, while a checkride is a government practical test, scored against fixed technical standards. The practical takeaway is simple: you cannot prepare for both the same way. One rewards how you work with people under pressure, the other rewards precision against a published standard, and knowing which one you face next changes what you rehearse this week.
TL;DR:
- Sim assessments evaluate a candidate’s trainability, crew resource management, and decision-making under pressure, primarily for airline hiring and advancement.
- Checkrides verify technical compliance against standard criteria and are administered by designated examiners to certify pilot licensing and specific privileges.
- Success in a sim depends on demonstrating adaptability and teamwork, while a checkride emphasizes precise execution and thorough knowledge of standards.
- Preparation should focus on sim scenarios like engine failures and automation issues, with specific drills for situational awareness and SOP adherence.
- Simulator training enhances handling emergencies safely and builds confidence, but it cannot replace the formal assessment and certification processes for pilots.
Table of Contents
- Sim assessment vs checkride at a glance
- What airlines look for in a simulator assessment
- What a checkride actually tests and who administers it
- What evaluators are actually watching for
- Scenarios and maneuvers worth rehearsing
- Your prep checklist for the week before
- How structured simulator training builds both skill sets
- An instructor’s honest take on sim prep versus checkride prep
- Prepare for both with structured Level D training
- FAQ
- Sources
Sim assessment vs checkride at a glance
The fastest way to triage your prep time is to separate what each evaluation actually measures and who is doing the measuring.
- Purpose and stakes: a sim assessment decides whether an airline wants to hire or advance you. A checkride decides whether a regulator certifies you to act as pilot in command or exercise specific privileges.
- Who conducts it: airline training captains or third-party assessors run sim evaluations; designated pilot examiners (DPEs) or check airmen administer checkrides under regulatory authority.
- Scoring focus: sim assessments weight non-technical competencies such as cooperation and situational awareness heavily, while checkrides weight technical compliance against the Airman Certification Standards.
- Format and timing: sim events often run as paired-candidate scenarios with scripted failures, while a proficiency check or practical test follows a planned profile, with examiners allocating around 120 minutes for the test itself and roughly four hours total once briefing and paperwork are included.
- Immediate outcome: a sim assessment produces a hiring or advancement decision; a checkride produces a certificate, rating, or a documented disapproval.
Both environments can feel similar once you are strapped into the seat, which is exactly why candidates misjudge them.
What airlines look for in a simulator assessment
A simulator assessment uses the same Level D or Level C full-flight simulators you would train in operationally, but the grading sheet looks nothing like a checkride form. Airlines are not confirming that you can fly, they are predicting how you will behave as a future employee inside a crew.
- Trainability comes first: assessors watch how quickly you absorb a correction and apply it on the next attempt, since this predicts how fast you will progress through type-rating training.
- Crew resource management gets scored continuously, often through a NOTECHS-style framework covering cooperation, leadership, situational awareness, and decision making.
- SOP adherence matters even when the airline’s own SOPs differ slightly from what you learned elsewhere; assessors want to see you follow the briefed procedure, not improvise a personal workaround.
- Abnormal event handling is built into the script deliberately, often through evidence-based training or line-oriented evaluation concepts that assess integrated competencies rather than isolated maneuvers.
Many programs pair two candidates in the same cockpit for part of the session, which means your communication with the other pilot is graded alongside your flying. Debriefs tend to focus less on raw stick-and-rudder accuracy and more on decision quality: did you recognize the problem, verbalize it, and work it as a team.
What a checkride actually tests and who administers it
A checkride, more formally a practical test or proficiency check, exists to confirm you meet a published regulatory standard, not to predict how well you will fit a particular airline’s culture. Before the test even starts, there are prerequisites to verify.
- Confirm your logbook, medical certificate, and any required endorsements are current and match what the examiner will check against the application.
- Review the relevant ACS or practical test standard in full, since examiners score discrete items against that published document rather than a subjective impression.
- Expect the examiner to brief the test plan, confirm aircraft or simulator serviceability, and document each phase as the test progresses, a process EASA guidance frames as planning an efficient profile that still covers every mandatory skill item.
- Know that knowledge and systems questions during the oral portion carry as much weight as the flying itself, since a technically smooth flight with a shaky oral can still result in disapproval.
The outcome also means something different. A checkride produces a certificate or rating, a government record that travels with you regardless of employer. A sim assessment produces an internal decision that only matters to the company that ran it. Jurisdictional differences also affect how your existing license maps to a new one, which is worth understanding before you schedule anything through a license conversion pathway.
What evaluators are actually watching for
Both evaluation types reward specific, observable behavior rather than a vague impression of competence. Knowing the exact categories lets you perform to the rubric instead of guessing.
- Cooperation: offering and accepting help from the other pilot without defensiveness, and acknowledging callouts rather than talking over them.
- Leadership and managerial skills: setting clear priorities during a high-workload event and stating the plan out loud instead of just executing it silently.
- Situational awareness: catching a developing problem before it becomes an emergency, and verbalizing what you see even when no one asks.
- Decision making: stating options, picking one, and explaining the reasoning briefly rather than freezing or changing plans repeatedly.
- Technical precision: holding maneuver tolerances defined in the ACS, flying stabilized approaches, and executing checklists in the correct sequence with accurate callouts.
NOTECHS-style scoring gives airlines a repeatable way to rate these non-technical behaviors, though how consistently two different raters score the same performance depends heavily on how well those raters were trained. A common red flag in paired sim sessions is a candidate who flies precisely but shuts out or overrides their partner, which tends to lower the individual score even though the stick-and-rudder work looked fine.
Pro Tip: Narrate your scan and your decisions out loud during practice sessions, even when flying solo, so the habit is automatic by test day.
Scenarios and maneuvers worth rehearsing
Preparation gets more efficient once you know which specific events show up repeatedly in each setting.
- Engine failure after takeoff appears in nearly every sim assessment and most multi-engine checkrides; assessors want to see the correct memory items, a stabilized climb, and a verbalized plan for the return.
- Automation failure or unreliable airspeed tests your willingness to revert to raw data and basic flying skills rather than fighting the automation.
- Diversion and operational irregularities, such as a sudden weather change or a medical event, test decision making and crew coordination more than stick skills.
- Upset recovery and line-oriented event sets are common in evidence-based training programs and reward calm, methodical recovery over aggressive control inputs.
- Steep turns, instrument approaches, and missed approaches remain core ACS items on most checkrides, graded against explicit altitude, airspeed, and heading tolerances.
Assessors in both settings are watching for the same visible markers: a verbalized plan, correct callouts at the right moments, and a stabilized aircraft before the next phase begins. Specific drills for these event sets are worth building into your sim practice sessions well before test day.
Your prep checklist for the week before
A structured final week beats scattered practice every time, because it forces you to rehearse the actual event types rather than just logging hours.
- Six days out: schedule a targeted sim session focused on CRM-heavy events like diversions or paired-candidate scenarios, not generic pattern work.
- Four days out: drill the specific ACS maneuvers you are weakest on, timing yourself against the tolerances in the standard.
- Two days out: run an oral review session covering systems, limitations, and regulatory prerequisites, since this is where disapprovals often originate.
- One day out: verify every document, endorsement, and logbook entry the examiner or assessor will check.
- Use a 10-minute briefing template before every practice leg: weather, threats, plan, and callouts, said out loud every time.
- Run a 5-minute memory-item drill daily during the final week so emergency procedures are automatic rather than recalled under stress.
- If you have a partner, rehearse a paired CRM scenario together so you practice supporting each other, not just flying solo.
The night before, keep the routine boring: a short flow review, an early dinner, and real sleep instead of last-minute cramming. The goal of all this structure is to translate sim performance into checkride-grade flying, meaning precision under an actual test mindset rather than the looser standard you might accept in casual practice. Specific preparation priorities backed by sim metrics evaluators track can help you decide where those final hours go.
How structured simulator training builds both skill sets
Level D full-motion simulators let you rehearse failures that would be unsafe or impossible to practice in an actual aircraft, from engine fires to full electrical failures, which matters for both sim assessments and checkrides alike.
- Repeated exposure to scripted abnormal events builds the trainability and composure that airline assessors specifically look for.
- Instructor-led debriefs after each session connect observed behavior to defined standards, mirroring how EBT and competency-based assessment frameworks evaluate integrated performance rather than isolated maneuvers.
- Curriculum built around current ACS items and NOTECHS-style behavioral markers keeps practice aligned with what both employers and examiners actually score, and our instructors bring current and former airline experience to that debrief process.
An instructor’s honest take on sim prep versus checkride prep
If you remember one rule, make it this: practice the checkride for precision and practice the sim assessment for composure under ambiguity. I tell candidates to build a one-page quick-reference of callouts and memory items, then rehearse a 10-minute briefing before every single leg until it becomes reflexive. If you want guided repetition instead of figuring this out solo, structured sim courses built around current standards will get you there faster than self-study alone.
— Jake
Prepare for both with structured Level D training
We built our programs around the exact gap this article describes: pilots need different reps for employer sim assessments than they need for regulatory checkrides, and most self-study plans blur the two together. Our courses are designed to address these differences separately.
- The ATP-CTP Course covers airline-standard CRM and procedural events the way assessors actually score them.
- Our type-rating programs for Airbus and Boeing aircraft build the technical precision checkride examiners expect, inside Level D full-motion simulators.
- Our license conversion pathways handle ICAO to FAA, EASA to FAA, and DGCA to FAA paperwork so your prep time stays on flying, not logistics.
Every course pairs veteran airline-captain instruction with structured debriefs mapped to current standards, plus logistical support for scheduling and documentation. If you are facing an airline assessment or a checkride in the next few months, book simulator time and build your final weeks around the real event, not a guess.
FAQ
What is the most commonly failed checkride?
There is no single official ranking of which checkride fails most often, since pass rate data varies by test type and reporting year. Candidates and examiners commonly point to instrument proficiency checks and initial multi-engine checkrides as events where oral knowledge gaps and automation mismanagement trip people up most.
Which pilot checkride is the hardest?
Difficulty depends on the rating and aircraft involved, so there is no single verified answer. Type-rating checkrides on complex jets tend to carry the heaviest workload because they combine systems depth, automation management, and strict ACS tolerances in one session.
What checkride has the lowest pass rate?
No authoritative source in this article publishes a comparative pass rate across checkride types, so stating a specific figure would be guessing. What is well documented is that disapprovals frequently trace back to oral knowledge gaps or prerequisite paperwork issues rather than stick-and-rudder failures, which is why reviewing prerequisites before the test matters as much as flying practice.
How is a sim assessment different from a checkride in practice?
A sim assessment is run by an airline to predict hiring fit, scoring cooperation, trainability, and decision making. A checkride is run by a regulator or examiner to certify technical compliance against a published standard like the ACS.
Can simulator practice replace an official checkride?
Simulator practice builds procedural fluency and confidence but does not replace the regulatory function of a checkride. AOPA guidance notes that sim time is excellent for flows and instrument scan work but cannot fully substitute for the examiner interaction and pressure of an actual practical test.
Sources
- Do Your Checkride - AOPA
- Flight Examiner Manual
- Competency Based Training and Assessment publication (Qatar CAA)
- Measuring CRM Aptitude: Is NOTECHS a Suitable Tool for Pilot Selection?