ATPL/CPL/IR Theory

FWIW, and not directly relevant to ATPL, I looked at Peters Software when doing my JAA IR.

They didn't do the 7-exam QB required for the UK PPL/IR exam set. They did just a 10-exam set, and when I enquired about this, they never replied. I also asked their reps at Friedrichshafen but they were totally clueless. So I used the flyingexam.com QB, which came with GTS where I did 3 days, which worked OK but in retrospect does need a lot of weeding to correspond to the real UK CAA exams.

I am not suprised Indians are doing EASA exams. An FAA ATP is good only if the carrier is flying N-regs (or some other FAA based stuff e.g. Caymans, Aruba, but that is just bizjets, not airlines) but you can't get a public transport AOC in or anywhere near Europe for an N-reg unless it is operated as EASA.

Also, the EASA ATPL is by far the harder, because you need 500hrs in a multi pilot cockpit. So if you want an airline career, outside the USA, you need the EASA papers and then if you want to, you can convert to the FAA ones easily enough. If you have 1500hrs, including 100 night, you can just sit the single ATP written, do the checkride, and your ICAO Type Rating carries over anyway (AFAIK).

I did my IR last year in Germany. Here, one does not get a choice to split the theory exam into two sittings, all subjects have to be done in one full day of exams at the site of the LBA in Braunschweig.

I did the very same thing and while I also started at 08:00 am and took the train back home at 13:00, it is definitely possible to do it in two or more sessions. Every subject you don't complete counts as not passed and you can redo it. Most IR students I talked to went two or three times and only prepared certain subjects.

IR students are rare in Braunschweig, it's almost entirely ATPL and a huge percentage is foreigners. When I was there, the majority were from India. There are some FTOs that specialize in foreign students. When asked why on earth an Indian would go to Germany instead of the US, the answer was that a EASA ATPL is preferred over an FAA ATPL by airlines. It probably prepares the students better for insane airline bureaucracy and tedious tasks

I found the LBA IR exams to be brilliantly organized. The room is fantastic, the equipment top notch -- modern PCs, large desks with a lot of space between them, good color printouts, helpful staff and most importantly I am convinced that there is a very good filter on the question database. While I prepared hundreds of utterly useless BS questions (often with what I considered to be wrong answers), none of them showed up in the exam. It was all stuff where one could make a point that they're actually relevant. Given that so little information is available about the exams and everything has a high risk of being subjective/outdated/wrong, I prepared far too well.

Peter's Exam is the tool of choice for LBA. I used a lot of tools and made the terrible mistake of relying on the one with the largest question database (aviationexam.com) only to find that it had all past questions as well that have been erased from the official database years ago. Peter's EXAM is based on reports from the actual LBA tests and it only has a fraction of the questions that others have. The bigger the country, the higher the chance that there are people that choose a subset from the full database so better choose a tool that is specific to your country. My goal was to pass with 76% and I was ashamed to see that I scored 95%+ in all subjects. For about 40-50% of the questions I didn't even have to read them but recognized it by the answer alone. Many hours lost on inefficient training.

PS: I took all exams in English because I feared that a stupid question combined with incompetent translation results in even more pain. In retrospect, I think the German version would have been easier because there they can apply their own creativity to make them bulletproof. I found that they often added some detail to the English questions that was not in the database to avoid ambiguity. Their software allows the student to flag a question and leave a remark. I presume the German language version is even clearer -- for those who are native speakers of course

Over here the IR exams are not mixed with ATPL, they are on a different day. There were about 7 or 8 candidates present in total. It's good to share the experience with others.

That's a nice-looking aircraft in your avatar, btw :)

Rich,

I very much look forward to reading your article.

When I went to the LBA I was the only one doing the IR exam that day. All the 30+ others in the room were doing (or re-doing in some cases) part of their ATPL-exams.

I don't recall seeing that, and I am pretty sure it isn't in the "UK CAA reduced" 7-exam IR set (because I did the air law mock exam 37 times) but it could be in the 14-exam ATPL exam set. There is a LOT of stuff in that which PPL/IR customers don't have to do.

Croatian 7-exam IR set is reduced only in terms of number of questions. I realized (and lately got confirmation from Agency) that they used ATPL database with query that defined reduced number of questions for IR exams compared to ATPL ones. So, in Air-law I had question about number of copies of different documents and declarations when you fly cargo plane :)

Several questions on those subjects are in the QB at aviationexam.com, which appears to be recognised by most current students as the most up-to-date online QB just now (since they changed the TK syllabus last year). We also still have questions on aircraft reference field lengths and runway categories, as well as the takeoff and other separations that Peter mentions.

What amuses me, for the enroute distance-based separations, is how pilots might be expected to know whether they are 3, 4 or 5 NM behind the previous aircraft. I'm not sure even TCAS would be a reliable guide!

What's unarguably irrelevant is memorising the width categories of taxiways, or the dimensions of painted touchdown zone markers as related to runway length :)

I don't recall seeing that, and I am pretty sure it isn't in the "UK CAA reduced" 7-exam IR set (because I did the air law mock exam 37 times) but it could be in the 14-exam ATPL exam set. There is a LOT of stuff in that which PPL/IR customers don't have to do.

The Air Law does contain a huge amount of stuff which is pure ATC material and of zero use to pilots. The most notorious examples are things like the takeoff separation with twin parallel runways separated by various distances.

However when I argued that point in the professional study section of a well known mostly-airliner forum I got shot down, by somebody saying that I need to know that in case there is no ATC. Yeah, right, jet operations, twin runways and no ATC? In reality, if you were departing non-ATC in a PA28, behind a 747, you wait 3 or 4 minutes and that covers the worst case. But it shows there is always somebody who thinks Item 139 is relevant, so any committee tasked to rationalise the stuff has a big job - especially if almost none of the members are pilots.

What's unarguably irrelevant is memorising the width categories of taxiways, or the dimensions of painted touchdown zone markers as related to runway length :)

If that is seriously in the syllabus it is a joke.

90% of the JAA IR theory is either irrelevant or is simply wrong. An example of the latter is in Nav where you learn to flight plan using airway charts, but almost none of the routes thus developed will pass Eurocontrol validation

I'd classify that in the 60% "arguably relevant but of no practical use" category. Relevant, in that you learn how to interpret a chart; but of no practical use for the reasons you give. Perhaps I am being generous.

What's unarguably irrelevant is memorising the width categories of taxiways, or the dimensions of painted touchdown zone markers as related to runway length :)