PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - ATPL Flight Planning Tricks, Short Cuts etc
Old 27th May 2011, 06:33
  #211 (permalink)  
dotau
 
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Gold Coast
Age: 42
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I passed this exam today.

I attended the AFT class a while ago and kept putting the exam off as I wasn't confident / lack of motivation / bad time management / better things to do / work (excuses) and was glad to get it over and done with.

I ended up buying a DT210 between my time away from AFT and reading over the notes again, helped a lot during the exam as I knew where the buttons were. I also used the formula to calculate TAS from a given mach number, only because I was familiar with doing it that way rather than looking up the appropriate level in the blue book as others have suggested in this thread.

There was only about two questions that threw me off a little, one was a yaw damper inoperative question - flying from Darwin to Alice Springs @ FL330, 0.82M, overhead ***** (forgot name already but circled on my erc) yaw damper fails. Well I knew I couldn't maintain FL330 so I used FL290 to continue to Alice, BUT I couldn't for the life of me remember the limiting speed (turns out to be 0.7 something) so I continued to plan at 0.82M, silly me, totally forgot about that one.

The other was a maximum altitude given a track and a BRW. I used the altitude table relevant to the hemispherical IFR cruising levels when I think I should have gone for the maximum (RTFQ).

Some questions were similar, if not exactly the same as those in the AFT practice exams, like 315nm from Perth PNR. 9000kg zone fuel between two points from Brisbane to Bali, TAS from a hold at FL270 with EMZW of 67T. 1inop between Brisbane and Sydney (engine failure at V1 - this question originally was planning from Brisbane to Melbourne)

I found it pretty straight forward, I studied for about 2 weeks prior to the exam or about 3 to 4 hours per day, I gave myself the weekends off. The material came back pretty quickly for me. There weren't any tricks to the exam, no real curve balls that threw me off or that I couldn't just figure out. I had to sit back on a couple just to think to figure out what they were asking.

FWIW, I started at the 5 mark questions first and worked backwards. Finished the exam with about 15 minutes to spare, didn't worry about double checking anything and just hit submit.
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