The UK CAA published the minutes of last month’s EASA board meeting recently.
Some interesting points to note:
Ongoing focus is on risk based regulation, rather than just for paperwork sake.
Re-emphasised the change of approach in GA is from rulemaking to safety promotion.
Bunch of work related to the updating of the Basic Regulation, intended to last for 10+ years
New Europe wide central question bank (ECQB) due out this month. Presumably would replace all the national variants. French and UK CAA heavily involved
Europe seem to be keener than the US to encourage Drones and related industry innovation. Will remove 150kg limit and integrate with other aircraft rules
There were no less than three presentations on how the rulemaking process will be improved.
Useful efforts on good governance, cyber security etc.
At this high level, it sounds good. As always, the proof will be in what is delivered (and when), but this seems quite positive to me.
DavidC wrote:
New Europe wide central question bank (ECQB) due out this month.
Is that for ATPL? Or all exams?
So this QB will not be published. This is what they have been trying to do for ages.
But all that will happen is a reversion to the old system where each FTO student was assigned one Q to memorise, and a man from the FTO with a clipboard stood outside the exam room exit and quickly wrote them down. That is how the main FTOs each developed their own QBs from the then CAA questions.
I also wonder what the “IR” QB means, because a PPL/IR candidate should not be doing any subset of the ATPL QB. The jet etc questions are not supposed to be there. There should be a CB IR QB for these people.
I would have thought that the IR questions are simply a subset of the full ATPL ones, selected for relevance with the syllabus. I don’t see the problem there, assuming the question selection has been done correctly. Given the highly variable quality and relevance of ATPL QBs in some EASA countries (which Peter has commented on before – several of the better/larger NAAs have filtered out the rubbish, some of the smaller ones left it all in), surely this would be an improvement.
I couldn’t help but have a little smirk when noting that there are two forms on the ECQB page. One is to report errors in any of the questions, and requires the question to be written out in full. The second is to report violations where any questions are made public. I suppose you’d have to report yourself for a violation if a groundschool was to report an error heard from one of their students ;)
It seems the FAA also has a policy of not publishing their QB, although I believe they did so in the past. This (undated) ground school reports that of the 2000 FAA QB, about 400 are public.
I just re-read the EQCB webpage linked above, where it states there are around 10,000 questions already today. Over the next 5 years they plan to add 1500 new and review 2000 each year. This will be a very large database – 10x the size of the FAA one – so quite difficult to replicate or learn parrot fashion. Students may have to learn the underlying fundamentals!!
I felt that the questions in my IR theory test were similar but not identical to some in the practice QB, so if you were only memorising answers then that wouldn’t work.
It’s a little unclear as to when this new QB would be rolled out continent wide. Presumably medium term all states will set the same tests using this same QB, unlike today where there are national variants/filters.
and the point is?
Any evidence it makes for a better IR pilot, in fact any evidence based assessment of whether the exams are fit for purpose?
I thought not.
Peter wrote:
According to a well informed post here this proposal for an EASA QB has been abandoned.
The ECQB has not been abandoned. The “project” was parked for a while, but as you’ll see from the MB report, it has been restarted and there is now a system for maintaining the ECQB.
