PlasticPilot.net

If you’re an ATPL student in Europe, you know first hand how painful the theoretical exams are. A non-negligible part of the information you have to memorize is not exactly useful in flight. When getting through that process for my IFR rating, I lost a couple of point in the navigation exam, because I did not knew how many atomic-clock are on-board each GPS sattelite.

I’m not sure about air-law, but I think one of my wrong answers was about the number of paint lines accross runway to materialize the threshold, when the runway is more than 45 meters wide. This could be fun, if it was not sad. Many pilots-to-be waste hours learning useless things.

For a couple of years, I did teach principles of flight at PPL level, and the challenge was simple: teach what is useful for flight, but also what is useful for passing the exam. The overlap between the two domains is surprisingly tiny.

I probably was amongst the last generation of pilots not using online theory learning. We already had a question database, but we had to go through the 200 hours of “presence learning”. This is now reduced to something like 30 hours, the rest of the time being spent using online learning tool. Believe or not, but for the exams, we used pens and paper !

The authority insist a lot, that the questions are secret, and shall not be noted down, memorized, or communicated to anybody. So the online database we used (and paid for) was officially “inspired” by the JAA questions database.

Nowadays, many services offer online question databases for practice, which are all more or less “inspired” from the exam questions. Most of them require registration and / or a fee. However, I recently stumbled upon an online list of questions, with their answers.

I browsed it, and on the base of my own experience, In can confirm that these questions are extremely similar to the ones you’ll find in the exams. The only missing thing is the list of possible answers, only the correct one is provided.

The repartition of proposed answers is always the same: a completely stupid and incredible one, one obviously false, one close to the correct one, and the correct one itself. So this database won’t help you to deal with selecting the less wrong answer, but will give you a good idea about the kind of questions you can expect, and is also a good revision tool.

Click here to visit the free online JAA ATPL questions database.

UPDATE: click here for more freebies for pilots.

Each flight is an event, but some are more memorable than others, and are never forgotten. Some are common to all pilots, some are more personal. The ranking probably also varies amongst pilots, for me it’s as follow…

Number 3: the PPL examination flight
This is the very first in-flight exam, hopefully the first of a long series… Even if one gets there only with the blessing of a trustful instructor, the possibility to fail exists. For student pilots which have been trained by a single instructor, it’s also the first flight with someone else in the right-hand seat.

My personal exam took place on a day with less than optimal weather conditions, but it went fine. I commented all what I was doing, and the examiner was silent. I made what I had to do, and managed the usual “emergencies”. I executed the imposed maneuvers as in preparation flight, and the landings were acceptable.

The presence of the examiner - which is also an instructor - somehow diminish the stress. A pilot mistake would result in a failed exam, but no one would get hurt…

Number 2: the first solo flight
This is certainly something each pilot do remember. At some point during training, the instructor decides to jump off the plane (usually while on ground), and the student has to fly one or several circuits on his own. The presence of the instructor on ground is somehow re-assuring, in the sense that he think it’s time, and that weather is ok…

But anyway the first circuit flown alone on board is stressful, exciting, and memorable. Where I trained, the circuit is relatively long (usually 7 minutes with the basic trainer plane I used to fly), and I spent time in downwind singing the checklists. I know some other who scream, or remain silent… I’ve heard a lot of different reactions.

I was not particularly stressed, while in-flight, because I was concentrated so much… The emotion hit me when I opened the canopy to get out of the plane…

Number 1: the first flight after the exam
Many pilots would say that the first solo is the most impressive moment. For me however, the first flight after I got my license was much more stressful and emotional. This is probably because I was fully in charge for the first time. There was no examiner, no instructor by the runway, no one to validate the go / no-go decision. Only me… and my beloved one !

Having my wife on board also certainly contributed to make this flight a very special one. I spent one and a half year to complete my PPL, taking lessons beside my job. After that, the big moment come to take my wife for her first flight in a light aircraft. She was probably as stressed as I was, but she reacted well, and enjoyed it.

Flying completely on my own for the first time, with my wife on board was a great feeling. It was a short leg, to see if she liked it or not, and the leg back was a bit longer, because she liked it. This flight was definitely the most memorable of the three, and after the second landing I had a feeling of great achievement which was really satisfactory.

Now that I shared my top three moments, I’d be happy to know more about yours in comments.