Pilot forums returning to the perennial "rank your checkrides" thread reveal a surprisingly consistent pattern across generations and career paths: the Instrument Rating and Commercial Multi-Engine checkrides are most frequently cited as the hardest, while the Private Pilot checkride—despite being the first and most emotionally fraught—often ranks as comparatively easier once candidates have more experience to compare it against. The initial CFI ride is a frequent outlier at the top of difficulty lists, not because the flying itself is harder, but because it demands simultaneous mastery of stick-and-rudder skills, deep systems and regulatory knowledge, and the ability to teach and narrate maneuvers in real time to a Designated Pilot Examiner who is evaluating instructional technique as much as airmanship. ATP and type-rating checkrides, by contrast, are frequently described as procedurally rigorous but less stressful in isolation because candidates arrive after weeks of structured, simulator-based training in a Part 121/135 or Part 142 environment where the checkride is the capstone of a tightly scripted syllabus rather than an open-ended oral and flight test.
For working pilots, this kind of thread is more than nostalgia—it's an informal data point on where the ACS (Airman Certification Standards) framework creates genuine skill gaps versus where anxiety and unfamiliarity simply inflate perceived difficulty. Flight instructors and DPEs pay attention to these patterns because they inform how training providers sequence maneuvers, when to introduce scenario-based decision-making, and how much oral-exam prep time to allocate relative to flight-portion prep. The instrument checkride's reputation for difficulty, for instance, tracks closely with real-world safety data showing that loss-of-control and CFIT accidents disproportionately involve instrument conditions—reinforcing why examiners and training departments continue to weight IFR proficiency heavily even as GPS/WAAS approaches and glass-panel automation have changed the mechanics of flying an approach compared to the VOR/NDB era many senior pilots trained in.
The discussion also surfaces a persistent industry tension: checkride outcomes remain highly dependent on individual examiner style, regional DPE availability, and local training culture, despite the ACS's stated goal of standardizing evaluation criteria nationally. Pilots comparing notes across different examiners and flight schools routinely find wide variance in oral-exam depth, scenario complexity, and tolerance for minor deviations—variance that becomes more consequential as the pilot pipeline strains under examiner shortages and multi-month scheduling backlogs in many regions. This matters operationally for Part 135 and corporate flight departments building their own pipelines of newly certificated pilots, since checkride rigor (or lack thereof) is one imperfect proxy they use when evaluating low-time hires who haven't yet accumulated flight-hour history to speak for itself.
Broader industry dynamics amplify the relevance of these informal comparisons. Airlines and regional carriers pushing accelerated ab initio and cadet programs are compressing the traditional certificate progression, meaning today's candidates often stack Private, Instrument, Commercial, CFI, and ATP-CTP milestones faster than prior generations—shrinking the recovery time between checkrides that many veteran pilots credit for consolidating skills. At the same time, growing reliance on AATDs and FTDs for instrument and commercial training is changing how candidates arrive at the checkride, sometimes with more procedural repetition but less raw stick time in variable real-world conditions. As the industry continues debating ACS revisions, examiner standardization, and the right balance of simulator versus aircraft training, these grassroots "hardest checkride" comparisons function as an informal barometer of where the certification system is succeeding at producing well-rounded pilots—and where anxiety, examiner variability, or training shortcuts may be masking real competency gaps that show up later in operational settings.