I have somehow been invited to join a board of GA people to help the our small “CAA” to build/manitain a national PPL TK question bank. The “CAA” does not have the ressources and asks people from the community to help, explaining that it will make the tests cheaper because they will then save the manpower to do it in-house.
This new “board” will meet for the first time in a few of weeks and we are supposed to get a briefing on how to produce good multiple choice questions, and then, I guess, divide the subjects between us, go home and think of some good questions, with one correct and three wrong answers to each; and then send them to our “CAA” to use in the coming LAPL/PPL TK tests. Of course the AMC to Part-FCL has the syllabus outlining the scope of the questions. – There has probably (hopefully) been put more thought into the concept than what I am suggesting here.
What I wonder is whether we are doing this in parallel in every EASA country. It seems that rather than doing an amateurish job in a similar fashion 10 times, we should unite forces and arrange to share some basic questions, using the combined ressources to QA the questions, and then each country would only have to add the maybe 5 or 10 % of the questions that concern national peculiarities.
Anyone with a knowledge of national PPL question banks?
What exactly is “TK” in PPL TK ? Surely your CAA must have a whole bunch of questions from earlier years?
Theoretical Knowledge
The national CAAs will each have their own PPL QBs but (a) all will be different and (b) all will contain a load of nonsense.
The issue with PPL theory is that – unlike the JAA IR TK which was almost totally irrelevant – you do actually have to know some of it to fly safely and equally importantly to fly usefully.
The Big Q is which bits can be removed. I think maybe 75% is nonsense.
But then it leads to the old debate about what should a PPL contain. The traditional patronising view is that it is a “license to learn” (usually followed by “young man”). The business case for training pilots to actually go somewhere doesn’t exist – unless you adopt the advanced concept that they might rent your planes and fly them if they do know how to go somewhere.
This sounds like a great opportunity to do something about this situation.
In Germany the TK was reworked a year ago, or a bit more. Given the design of these tests (multiple choice), I don’t think that much could be seen to be nonsense, though. Plus the complete catalogue has to provide enough questions for a selection of it.
However, I think the contact to the people actually developing / maintaining the TK is the best way to go.
Why bother. Just use another national aviation authority database.
PPL TK is what I called “flight theory”. I guess PPL PK is the same as “flying” 
At my work, which was previously owned by General Electric, we are still fighting these nonsense acronyms used by “GE” for for all and everything, and we are slowly getting it right
Why bother. Just use another national aviation authority database.
I agree, why bother indeed.
