I am almost finished my full IR course and the ATO brought me in for an hour of ground school test prep last week where we went through all of the stuff about alternates etc from Part OPS. I said to the instructor that I was doing the IR just for fun and shouldn’t the examiner grill me on Part NCO rather than OPS planning regularions. As usual the oddity of the SEIR student in the ATPL meant he didn’t know. I think he was so impressed that I knew what both were that he assumed I’d pass any oral exam!
Good Q.
I failed my “170A” IR “pre test” (a dodgy old UK institution; another story) partly because I specified Lydd as the alternate to Bournemouth. The FE said this is stupid because my paying passengers are not going to be interested in Lydd; I should have filed Southampton. I told him the wx at Southampton is usually identical to Bournemouth, but he wasn’t having it
Yes a huge thing in IR training is finding out what the examiner is expecting. Just being able to fly a plane and some approaches isn’t going to cut the mustard.
My other tip is to taxi bang on the yellow line. If you taxi really well, you will pass unless your flying is crap. If you can’t taxi on the line you will have failed even before you take off, and then you need to fly like an ace.
Also find out where the autopilot is permitted. And turn it off at least 10 mins before [hand] flying any approach, otherwise your flying is gonna be crap
It’s all being done on the ATO’s 172 unfortunately, as the owners put a stop to me using my own plane. So, no autopilot, no HSI
Instructor said I was a ‘shoe in’ and that the remaining 8 hours flying isn’t needed, but not so sure about that. The limited availability of places to go here means that the test format is an open secret, so will just use the remaining time to do holds and approached ad-infinitum.
There must be some IR instructors or examiners here who know the current situation…
I would expect an examiner to treat an IR in a SEP as Part.NCO – a CBIR does involve an oral component with some examiners drifting into CPL type questions. The CPL type questions and in certain cases general handling aspects are not strictly IR relevant.
However, if an approved course the questions should be limited to flight planning, performance and M+B.
FWIW, my CB-IR instructors have all pointed me to EASA Part-NCO as study material. Plus PANS-OPS (ICAO doc 8168) and Jeppessen for the chart legends. Are you sure you’re not confusing Part-OPS with PANS-OPS?
The Air Ops regulation has a number of parts.
Annex I – Definitions
- Annex II – Part-ARO
- Annex IV – Part-CAT
- Annex VI – Part-NCC
- Annex VII – Part-NCO
- Annex VIII – Part-SPO
Was he mistakenly testing you on Part-CAT rules or just on the Air Ops regs which could have been Part-NCO??
Sorry, I missed the subsequent replies to this thread. Yes there was lots of stuff about alternates which I hadn’t studied, particularly take-off alternates which I don’t believe is relevant for non-commercial stuff?
I was due to do the IR test today. Weather was too crap but we did the ground part. He wasn’t buying the Part NCO rules at all. Expected me to know all of the stuff about hard planning minima which NCO doesn’t have. Also 1500 m take-off vis rather than the 400 m that I thought was the limit. He recommended studying the Jepp manual (page 601-620 maybe?) before we do the flying element. Does anyone have that info in a pdf?
I still have the jepp manual sitting on my bookshelf! I’m happy to scan it when I’m back mid week if you need it.
Sounds like your being grilled a lot on the theory!