My son is making a (second) start on this.
We are going through the Trevor Thom Pooleys books. They are extremely tedious to use alone, and even the ones bought a few years ago are out of date on a lot of stuff, hence:
What is the best online QB? He’s signed up with PPL Cruiser
These QBs seem to come and go. I noticed with some amusement that the crappy one I used for the IR, flyingexam.com, has vanished. But the PPL is a very national thing. There is no JAA/EASA QB.
He also has the old (c. 2000) PPL Confuser book. I found this extremely good for the PPL and especially the vast amount of slide rule related stuff.
The plan is for him to get all the exams out of the way before commencing lessons. That way there is no risk of an interruption of training, which happens when e.g. you are ready to go solo and the school insists on the Air Law pass.
What are the requirements/limitations on the use of calculators? In my days the slide rule was mandatory for wind calcs, and the questions were rigged so the right answer was obtained only by using the slide rule and obtaining the rounding errors which the correct procedure delivered. You were allowed to do longhand (paper) calculations otherwise, but no calculators. Can one use a trig calculator today and use it for wind calcs? I’d estimate avoiding the slide rule saves 10+hrs on the ground school time.
He has a lot of flying experience in the TB20 so knows the overall “framework”.
Regarding the QB, I would recommend AirQuiz. I found them better than PPL Cruiser.
AirNav questions are quite different on PPL Cruiser vs. AirQuiz, which I found a bit strange. However, AirQuiz is more worth the penny as the access is longer (1 yr vs 90 days with PPL Cruiser).
What is allowed/not allowed? In my experience, a lot depends on the instructor. My school has many instructors and a few are quite strict about the regulations while others are more relaxed. Mind you, the strict ones don’t always know the exact rules either.
Of all the QBs I looked at during my training (2 years ago), the iphone app “easaPPLex” has the QB with the most “exam-like” questions in there. A lot of the QBs have questions in an older style and nothing like the actual exams. With the easaPPLex app, the questions are pretty much exactly like those in the exams. A massive help, especially given how old the books are.
I’m afraid you still have to use the flight “computer” for the wind calculations, fuel weight/volume calculations, etc for the exams that require it. No electronic calculators are allowed.
For the skills test however, there is no requirement to plan your route the old-fashioned way. I did my PLOG using SkyDemon, which was fine.
If your son can spare five straight days to knock it on the head, I would recommend Linda Wheeler at Denham.
I did her IMC/IR(R) course, and with a little preparation everyone passed.
Thanks for that tip, Jacko. I was in fact going to pay for a ground school down here but the school running them has just gone bust…
NickR – thanks too. It’s a bloody shame that normal calculators are not allowed. The use of the slide rule (of which the “CRAP-1” etc is just a version wrapped around in a circle, and I do know how a slide rule works since I used them at school in CZ 1965-69) even for multiplication and division has absolutely zero place in the latter part of the 20th century, onwards.
Peter wrote:
It’s a bloody shame that normal calculators are not allowed.
They are not immune to electromagnetic bursts or solar storms. Slide rules are 
airquiz.com was pretty good – not used it for a few years admittedly.
Airquiz.com:
Not updated for over a year. Is that to be expected, given the pace of the regs change? I don’t know enough to judge. Is SERA still some way away?
Of course all that actually matters is how close the QB is to the actual questions. For flying a real plane, most of the stuff doesn’t matter provided you know the stuff you need to know and do it right. There isn’t a plane flying behind you with CAA employees, measuring the distance from yours to the nearest cloud, etc.
I don’t recall using a calculator, not even for my IR theoretical.
Peter wrote:
The use of the slide rule (of which the “CRAP-1” etc is just a version wrapped around in a circle, and I do know how a slide rule works since I used them at school in CZ 1965-69) even for multiplication and division has absolutely zero place in the latter part of the 20th century, onwards.
Fortunately I have not even heard about the slide rule either in my PPL training or anywhere else. I have googled it now and still don’t understand why on earth anyone would use such a device in 2016.
It’s a bloody shame that normal calculators are not allowed.
Yes, it is. In Hungary, fortunately, they are allowed. I only realized that ca. 5 minutes before the exam so I asked the NAA inviligator if she could lend me one. And she could.
