EASA ATPL Theory

Alex wrote:

And I think a lot of the stuff I’m learning might not be usable in the cockpit

My friend who has around 28000 hours and both an EASA and FAA ATPL says that he has never found anything useful in the exams that was actually of any use in any of the flying that he has ever done….maybe an exaggeration, but you can see where he is coming from.

Please bear in mind that having taken the ATPL Exams, the clock is ticking and unless you meet all of the other requirements, CPL + IR within a 3 year window their validity remains only for an FI or the HPA rating.

The quality of exams is largely do to the poorly devised system for the generation and validation of exams by the JAA. Different countries were responsible for different subjects and proposed questions were accepted from a wide range of sources. The questions were then circulated to all member States for validation. Nil returns were treated as an agreement that the question submitted was acceptable. Most countries failed to respond to virtually all questions, because they had nobody with the knowledge or time to perform this task and by default most questions were entered into the CQB. They UK CAA attempted to validate and reject a multitude of questions but it fell on stony ground with the European Exams Committee. I was at that meeting and I recall the chairman saying: "A beam; a plank; a spar; what is the difference. Clearly he was une grande planche!

The planned EASA questions were eve worse, fortunately they ran out of money!

Congrats, Kerwin!

I’m feeling the pain myself right now. ATPL theory and full-time job is quite a challenge for me. I study 15-20 hours per week. Lucklily the GF is a pilot as well and is very supportive!

And I think a lot of the stuff I’m learning might not be usable in the cockpit, but it’s still very interesting nevertheless.

There is a difference. It’s one thing to teach something that’s only relevant to pilots of jets, it’s another thing to teach something that’s only relevant to people designing and certifying aircraft (as you’re training pilots). Such things are usually there because someone feels you need some understanding of them as a foundation.

Actually, I consider discrete mathematics quite useful. Or optimization. It’s applied mathematics after all. It obviously depends on what one is doing. But even user interfaces, for example, can throw a curve ball. Like when you want to give a user a graphical representation of something and you need to figure out a way to arrange it so it’s actually useful. That can flex some muscles.

Vladimir wrote:

There is a lot of useless information in some subjects (or even some whole subjects) but that’s unless you “go in that direction”.

The problem is – “that direction” is designing aircraft (do I need an evacuation slide? What material are crankcases made of?), equipping it (how many fire extinguishers?“), flying the single particular type that they used for the exams (questions about a particular FMS), designing rudimentary electronic circuits (Ohms law etc.), or launching satellites into orbit (”what is the inclination of the GPS satellite orbit?").

if “that direction” is “flying commercial aircraft safely”, they are not that helpful.

I have done both US and EASA exams (although not FAA ATPL, only PPL, CPL and IR) and that really drives home how pointless and broken the EASA theoretical knowledge machine is.

Is EASA producing instructors? Or is there a risk of them all dying off?

Martin, your entire post is exactly what I mean. There is a lot of useless information in some subjects (or even some whole subjects) but that’s unless you “go in that direction”. In general I find the ATPL theory to be a very common way of providing a broad variety of information and actually having a database of questions (98% of the questions on the test are out of this database) makes it relatively easy to pass the exams. Much easier than discrete mathematics or similar subjects I had to study and explain during my computer science degree studies.

Vladimir wrote:

Yes, the subjects contain a lot of useless information but again, which university did you go to and study a subject that was entirely relevant?

I felt that almost all of the programming/ software engineering classes I took were entirely relevant. In most cases, I already knew the subject and I never really had to learn something just to pass an exam. Yes, I took for example a class on functional programming and I knew it probably won’t be particularly useful but it was fun for me. The more theoretical classes weren’t as useful but that’s understandable if you’re not planning to head in that direction (there was still a minimum that was mandatory for everyone, mostly math). It wasn’t really a case of irrelevant material in a subject, it was a case of subjects not really useful to me. Like calculus (a nightmare of most students as the standard was quite high). Or data processing and organisation where we essentially learned the algorithms and data structures used in databases. I haven’t needed it yet. Not sure if it was mandatory or not, I know I took it and it was a breeze. I still fondly remember “programming” on paper, no computer allowed.