Hello John,
I must confess to having been rather perplexed by your original post in this tread. But having thought about it for a while, I concluded that you were probably thinking of the required distances TORR, ASDR and TODR, whereas the original question and my answer to it related to the TOD. When this is increased by the appropriate factors it gives the minimum acceptable TORA, ASDA and TODA. Logically these should be called the TORR, ASDR and TODR, but the author of the CAP chose not to do so. These relationships are some of the things that JAR students are required to know.
I certainly agree with your view that students should learn as much as possible about the subjects during their training. But there is an unhealthy tendency for far too many students to tell themselves that "it is all too difficult to understand, so I will just focus on feedback lists". This situation has not been helped by the fact that bootleg copies of the JAR question bank without any form of explanations, are freely available.
This problem is compounded by the fact that the examiners are far too slow in generating new questions. Students who simply learn the answers often find that 80% or 90% of their exam is made up of questions that they have already seen and memorized. This is great for national pass rates but pretty dreadful for the learning process.
Prior to the introduction of the JAR exams the old CAA performance examination was based almost entirely on the CAP. Any student who could get the correct answers out of the graphs in the CAP would pass the examination. Unfortunately this did nothing to improve their understanding of why aircraft perform the way they do or how they are likely to respond to changing conditions.
When the first students took the JAR exams they found that everything had changed. There were no questions requiring the use of the graphs, very few questions relating to the CAP, and almost all of the questions were based on "applied principles of flight". Needless to say the initial pass rates were pretty dreadful.
The schools quickly retuned their training to cover the "applied principles of flight" in more depth, and paid less attention to the graphs in the CAP. In most cases this meant going through all of the material in the CAP once or twice, but would not involve students doing large numbers of practice graphical exercises. At that stage we were probably producing pilots who had a far grasp of the fundamentals but couldn’t use a performance graph if their lives depended on it.
More recently the examiners have introduced larger numbers of graphical questions, such that there is a more even balance. If they can now vastly increase the rate at which new questions are introduced, we might have a reasonably effective system.
Hello Bultaco,
We need to go back and look at what we have just done.
We started with 4250 TORA, 4470 ASDA, and 4600 TODA. We then divided these by the factors listed in page 19.
This process gave us the de-factorised distances of 3220 based on TORA, 2605 based on ASDA, and 3030 based on TODA.
These are the maximum acceptable values for the TOD. We must not exceed any of these values, so we must use the smallest. This is 2605 based on ASDA.
But although this value came from the ASDA, it is the maximum acceptable TOD. So when we put this into the graph we are at screen height at the end of the TOD.