Will EASA publish a QB for the CBM IR?

The current one hasn't been published either, has it? From what I know it got "leaked" by certain CAAs.

What I found out is what I wrote here

Originally, the largest UK FTOs compiled their own question banks by assigning each exam cadet 5 questions to remember, and a man from the FTO stood outside the exam room with a notepad and quickly noted down the details before the cadet forgot. Over years, each FTO built up a QB, which they used internally. Some of these FTO QBs (e.g. Bristol or Oxford ATPL ground school) are nowadays circulating around the internet and can be found on P2P and bit-torrent networks. Later, around 2007, two groups of students did a "Freedom of Information" legal challenges in Denmark and Belgium and got the real JAA QB, and later it was translated into English.

The other scores where 100% (3x) and 97% (3x).

That is quite brilliant!

What is the timescale for the introduction of the CBM IR?

I am not aware that anybody knows, but the rumours I hear is that the April 2014 deadline will be either very tight or will be missed, for any kind of implementation by the training machinery.

A significant part of the Instruments exam is on compass turning errors

My guess is that those questions are worth about 5% and I ignored all of them. That is a good policy; in some school exams (e.g. Geography) the study workload for the 1 exam is perhaps 50% of the total of 10 exams so dropping it totally (just turning up and ticking some boxes) is a reasonable policy. Obviously if you actually need Geography then you have to do it properly, but almost no real job actually needs it. Getting a GCSE in English Language is worth far more, especially these days...

My vertical card compass has turning errors which are something very different from the normal compass (even though the cause is the same) and the IRI I flew with was totally baffled by it. The fact that the vertical card compass is infinitely more readable in all other phases of flight is irrelevant

Is it likely to discussed and prevaricated over for years to come?

I am sure it will continue to take up a lot of bandwidth

I don't want to sound cruel (not my style ) but there are two kinds of pilots: those who will do the IR, and those who will just talk about it, for ever.

I think it is a realistic observation, because it is a significant project, especially ab initio, it always will be so (because there are no proposals to reduce the content of the skills test, so your only slight simplification option will be to do it all in say Greece, which involves a large chunk of time away from home, which doesn't suit the vast majority of busy people who have the money to actually do it and use it) and the long term cost of IFR flying, with any kind of reasonable currency, is not exactly going down...

So a lot of people looking at it will never actually do it. The only way I see of changing this situation is to make it doable totally outside the FTO industry (FAA IR style) which isn't going to happen.

With a year's hindsight from when I did it all, I still think doing the JAA IR is the best option if you actually want the capability (which basically means you own a suitable plane and want to fly around Europe IFR). The exams are not the big issue but the need to pack the logbook with 50hrs at an FTO is a big punishment, however.

I am not encouraged by the silence around the CBM IR and the fact that it (or the EIR) has not even made the "smoke filled room" comitology process, where a number of national CAAs are believed to be waiting to kill the whole proposal.

they forgot to disable DirectoryListing

It is hilarious how often that happens

But even where dir listing is disabled (the default setting on www servers) one can still get a lot by trying out different filenames. One example I recall was the download of a huge quantity of installation manuals from the site of a well known avionics manufacturer, but the real 1st prize went to the mug who worked inside the company and whose PC got indexed by google. Somebody in the USA who was quite clever wrote a script which parsed the google listing and downloaded about 30GB of manuals. Nothing top secret because all of it is available to any dealer of that company, but still very useful.

Regarding Met, I have mixed views on this.

Obviously Met is hugely important to flying because basically the weather aspect of the go/no-go decision is made by relating the weather to the aircraft equipment (TKS, radar, etc) and performance.

But I think Met is very poorly taught.

It's "fun" to teach what kind of weather one can expect to find before or after a certain type of front, but there is no apparent way to obtain the data from the usual internet sources to fill in the picture in reality. I have never met anybody (online or personally) who was able (or willing) to counter this assertion, and I do know some people who are experts on Met.

I even went on an "aviation weather" course run by an ex UK met office forecaster. At the end of the way I was not at all wiser when it came to applying any of it to the go/no-go decision.

I think that, currently, if you use a GFS 3D profile site like this then that will totally beat any Met understanding from the JAA IR theory, when it comes to practical value.

I think the reason the theory training industry gets away with teaching such rubbish is because nearly all the students go on to fly jets, and a jet with total anti-ice, radar, a 5000fpm+ climb rate, a ~FL390 ceiling, and Cat3, will fly 99.99% of the time anyway. They do need to know some wx stuff but the conditions which are hazardous to us do not apply to them. The one exception is probably solid fog... they can land but can't (in most places) taxi afterwards. Also you spend many hours in the RHS, with an experienced training captain in the LHS, so the screw-up potential is very small.

If one was training IFR GA people, the syllabus would be totally different.