Plastic Pilot

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.

Each bad weather day is an opportunity for pilots to refresh theoretical knowledge. This sounds boring, and if you trained using JAA standardised books, they are probably more academic than friendly.

My tip for your next bad weather day is to look at what FAA provides. I don’t know if all US pilots use the FAA Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, but compared to the books I used to prepare my PPL, this FAA stuff is really good.

The 15 first chapters cover subjects corresponding to the 8 JAA topics (Air Law, Aircraft Knowledge, Flight Planning and Performance, Navigation, Principle of Flight, Meteorology, Human Performance, Operational Procedures).

My favorite chapter is Chapter 16 - Aeronautical Decision Making. It covers topic like how we make decisions, risk management, and so on. There are also some interesting mnemonics, like IMSAFE and DECIDE. Read chapter 16 to know what they mean…

I already posted about other good books to refresh your theory, but the FAA handbook has two major advantages over them. You can download it, and it’s available for free !