Bristol Question Base - as good as everyone says?

[bournemouth_pilot]

Hello all,
I've heard nothing but good things about the bristol question bank, but was wondering if anyone has taken exams recently to vouch for how good it is?
I've heard of someone who did Instruments a few days ago who saw hardly any bristol questions on the paper?
Cheers

[MagicTiger]

Do you believe your friend who said it was hardly any Bristol questions?

If so, not much of a friend if told you hardly any Bristol questions. Check out Bristol ATPL forums, is more updated all there.

Good in Bristol QB = easy exams!

[Nearly There]

The question bank is a good aid for revision, but you must know the subject matter.
The questions from Bristol should be treated as an indication of what to expect/style of question.

[777-Aviator]

Agree with Nearly There.. But talking about Bristol questions, recent feedback from those who have taken their JAA exams in the last couple of months indicates that new and "unheard of" questions are becoming a trend. & yes, many were unhappy with the instruments paper especially. It seems that a new JAA database is being incorporated with the previous ones, and Bristol guys don't have these I reckon!

Any comments from you Alex?

[eliasg17]

maybe some questions from V3 are appearing? It says when you start, for UK students to only study the V2. But i have heard that alot of questions are now coming up from V3?..Is this true?

[777-Aviator]

It says when you start, for UK students to only study the V2

Not anymore buddy!
& some questions aren't in v3 either!!

Good luck to those doing their exams in the future.

[paco]

Some students were memorising the answers, and not even reading the questions. Some of them have been altered so that the right answer is now the wrong one, without changuing the text of the answers.

Not before time.

Phil

[Alex Whittingham]

Yes, that's true. The UK CAA are also using questions from CQB15, the newest database, so there will be 'unseen' questions in some papers. Remember that question banks can never show you every question in the exam, that is not their purpose.

[clanger32]

Is Bristol as good as everyone says it is?
Frankly speaking "yes". If you don't use Bristol to help you prepare for the exams then unfortunately I suspect you'll be putting yourself at a huge disadvantage compared to everyone else.

Should you use Bristol QB as a substitution for actually KNOWING the subjects? Absolutely, positively not. As Paco points out, far too many people for far too long have used Bristol as their sole preparation for the exams. If by changing some of the questions, people are getting tripped up, then frankly - good.

There are some subjects where Bristol doesn't help so much (in terms of presenting the actual questions you get - such as Gen Nav), but even then, if you don't put the effort in to know the subject, you'll get destroyed in interview.

[paco]

"As Paco points out, far too many people for far too long have used Bristol as their sole preparation for the exams."

Before the mud pies start flying :) I was meaning "all databases", not singling out Bristol!

The answer is yes, it is as good as people say, but it is no substitute for learning - but you won't pass the exams without them. We've had some students who really knew their stuff try that and it didn't work!

Phil

[humanperformer]

I also sat Gen Nav and Met. You definitely need to know the subject for those 2nope! learn the methodology for gen nav and learn the database for met. I sat mine 2 years ago all q's were from bristol. I have a friend who has just sat his mod 1 for bristol and he said that 95% of the q's he had already seen and the rest was stuff he could work out from doing the QB (never opened the manuals).

My advice is that anything with calculations in learn how to do them as numbers can be changed, the 'wordy' bs learn and read the additional info that comes with some of the q's.

sod learning and when it comes to the interview jest get a tech interview questions book and wallahh....

[paco]

"(never opened the manuals)."

"sod learning and when it comes to the interview jest get a tech interview questions book and wallahh...."

If that's the future of our industry, thank the Lord I'm close to retirement. Your first type rating course will be interesting!

Phil

[The Terminator]

You can probably pass the tests on Bristol alone, and can pass the tests on studying the subject alone, but I think you are unlikely to get a high mark with out doing both,
as anyone who has sat the tests will know, some of those questions just don't make sense.

[humanperformer]

If that's the future of our industry, thank the Lord I'm close to retirement. Your first type rating course will be interesting!

Already done phil! currently in the middle of line training. Phil no offense but the crappy 14 exams have nothing to do with the future of the industry. I suspect what's happening here is that you actually hate the wannabes that are coming through because they are paying to fly and ruining the t&c's for the rest of us. Don't hate them rather hate the bean counters in the airlines. I am a qualified gp and when it came to my theoretical exams i used a question database in the form of past papers, when it came to the practical aspects i did what my lecturers instructors told me to do to pass the exams and it was the same with flight training. My neighbours daughter has just finished her GCSE's and their front room is littered with past papers....

Anyhow i'm supposed to be taking pax to dubai today, the captain i'm flying with today is quite hot :) must concentrate...

[liam548]

Hello all

I presume this has been asked before at some point but wanted an up to date answer.

CATS advertise £999 for their online course (without taking into account the £66 per exam fees), Bristol is considerably more expensive.

Simple question, is Bristol really worth the significant amount of extra money?

[VFR Transit]

Or EPTA Cabair Bournemouth Distance Learning is £895 saving a further £104.00

VFR

[paco]

I already have a job - and if you want a beer in Dubai, that's where I'm sitting right now (just under the Outer Marker).

I care about what happens to this industry - I don't want it to be diluted by lack of attitude and experience. I certainly don't want my grandkids to be flown by people who don't knoow what they're doing up there!

I have no problems with past papers either, but to use them instead of studying is not right (fancy not even opening the manuals - that smacks of laziness to a high degree). The crappy 14 exams are there for a purpose. Bad as they are, I think they should be treated with the respect they deserve if you want to be a real pilot. Currently, the standard of pilots required seems to be the equivalent of Microsoft Engineers, and if you know about computing, you know what I mean! ;) *. The bean counters will get what they deserve.


Phil

*I'm still one of the few PC engineers who can make a floppy cable with a hammer and a bit of wood. And use more than one type of FDISK :)

[Bro]

I find the attitude of some aspiring “professional” pilots quite disappointing. As a professional I have always wanted to learn as much as I could, to know the “why” not just the “what”.
I am now a ground school instructor. I believe that the exams are not perfect and should be much more focussed on what a pilot needs to know; questions which require you to know the size of the registration markings on the aircraft are, frankly, irrelevant to a pilot. However, should you be able to explain the basic principles of an ASI or GPS? Should you be able to say why movement of centre of gravity in the cruise affects fuel flow? In my opinion not only should you be able to do so, you should want to be able to.
I encourage the students I teach to use a database. A database is an extremely useful source of revision questions. I tell my students to answer a question; if they get the right answer fine, if they get it wrong to ask themselves why they got the wrong answer, to work out the correct answer using their notes. If they still cannot fathom it out, come and ask me. That way they will learn the subject, not just the answers.
At the end of the day people who are now students will want a job. It is no use in a job interview when asked how INS works to respond “but that is not in the database”.

[Capt Pit Bull]

What I find interesting is how a proportion of those people going through the early parts of their career seem to think they are qualified to pass judgement on the relevance of the ATPL syllabus.

My advice is wait until you've spent a while as a skipper flying around with newly minted F/Os. Take a look at the things that surprise them or catch them out. Then go back and take a look at the groundschool syllabus. You may find it surprising.


As an aside, humanperformer will probably have found the ATPL groundschool pretty easy. As a qualified doctor he will certainly have a rock solid scientific education, and demonstrated his ability to absorb factual information rapidly. Good for him... but that is NOT the universal educational profile of an ATPL student.

In my experience people that struggle with the ground school are those with either deficient basic education or lack of a work ethic. They either fix it, or stagger through by rote learning "a pass is good enough". Either way it can be formative; you tend to end up with either a methodical 'grafter' that works their arse off, or a 'bodger' that stops learning the moment they are signed off from line training, if they make it that far. The latter struggle through every base check bitching about how pointless it is.

learn the methodology for gen nav and learn the database for met.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, real life is not limited to CQB15. We can make aircraft and navigation equipment simple and more reliable but the one thing we can't do is control the weather. Advocating answering questions by rote is imho unprofessional, in the case of Met it's also stupid.

pb

[toff]

The Bristol question bank - based on my experiences over the past 18 months - contains the vast majority of the questions that the CAA could ever dream of asking you. The questions you see in the question bank will nearly always appear word-for-word in the actual exam paper. With this in mind, a lot of students that I came across would simply memorise every question, which can, with lots of hours of 'study', get you through the exams with respectable grades, but as soon as the CAA throws a new question into a paper, these students are stumped! When I sat the exam for Radio Navigation in mid to late 2009, a number of students failed because so few of the questions they had memorised actually appeared in the paper.

If you use the Bristol question bank along with lots of self-study using course manuals, you can't go wrong. But if you plan to just memorise everything you see, then you will most likely get caught out in one or all of your exams. And with every exam that you fail, it's another £86 down the drain.