Six sittings to pass all the PPL exams

[Mickey Kaye]

Just reading the revised Standards Doc 11 issued 19th December and section 2.10.6 page 10 states

"The applicant is allowed six sitting to pass all examinations. A sitting for the PPL and LAPL is defined as the attendance at an examination centre for the purpose of taking or writing a single or set of examinations in one day. Only one attempt at each paper may be made in any one sitting"

Is this new or have I missed this in the past? Seems a bit silly to me.

And SRG2155 Respect of failure of theoretical examination has mutated into a rainforest. Two pages and three copies are needed. Was the wheel broken before?

[Whopity]

The 6 sittings is a new EASA FCL.025 requirement.

FCL-025 (3) If an applicant has failed to pass one of the examination papers within 4 attempts, or has failed to pass all papers within either 6 sittings or the period mentioned in paragraph (2), he/she shall re-take the complete set of examination papers.

The CAA now propose 9 examination papers. They don't however seem too concerned about this requirement:

AMC1 FCL.215; FCL.235
THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE EXAMINATION AND SKILL TEST FOR THE PPL
(a) Theoretical knowledge examination
(1) The examinations should comprise a total of 120 multiple-choice questions covering all the subjects.

So much for "STANDARDISATION"! The RT practical appears to remain separate and presumably, is not considered in the term "all"!

Stds Doc 11 V10 was only issued in October and in less than 2 months has had to be replaced with V11! Is it any wonder that nobody can keep up.

The CAA never mastered the administration of F252s so what chance for the 2155 especially as many PPL students do not have a reference number!

Reading Doc 11 para 2.12.6 it states that a candidate who fails the 4th paper will have to resit all PPL Exams at Gatwick or a CAA Exam Centre. They do not appear to have invented a form for this one yet. SRG 2165 only caters for the 4th attempt. The cost of the resit £350 for 7 papers or £450 when they go to 9 papers. Will an ATO want to administer this process as they won't derive any income from it, will it be left to the candidate or will the CAA administer it until completion?

[AOJM]

Air Law and Operational Procedures is now split I hear? So you sit the same exam but gain two certificates? Odd because no papers have changed and that would bring it up to 8 examinations surely.

[Cows getting bigger]

I'm pretty close to giving up with all this nonsense. We are now at a point where we are questioning how many exams a PPL student should take. FFS! Many of the papers are so out of date the subject matter is irrelevant. (When did the UK get rid of RAS, RIS and FIS?).

Pick an SRG application form and it is three time bigger than it ever used to be and is probably wrong.

Ask a TI for an opinion on something (that is if you can ever get hold of one) and he won't give you one before telling you how overworked he is. You may be lucky and get an answer - it is a 50:50 whether he is right.

Try to get an ATO approval variation and expect a long long wait; I suggest a year's sabbatical, that is if you have the cash because you paid the CAA up front.

Wait at least two months for a licence to be turned-around. It will be wrong. You will be issued a seaplane rating when you applied for a helicopter CPL.

Pay in time and money for any mistakes you make on an application (yes, those same long-winded irrelevant forms which don't even use correct grammar - "proceeding" instead of "preceding"!). Of course, it was an acceptable oversight the other day when I received a regarding my ATO which quoted a wrong approval number and confused me with a third ATO some two hundred miles away!

Take a step into the more exotic stuff (you know, class/type ratings, examiner authorizations etc) and things get even worse. Speak to a helicopter guy and you wonder why he hasn't considered a kamikaze attack on Gatwick!

Enough is enough. It is time for the GA industry, especially those involved in training, to get together and publically tell the CAA that it is completely failing. Which bit of "your're killing us" are they not getting? They are a bleedin' shambles and the timerity behind the latest scheme of charges consultation(?) is astounding.

[Whopity]

Perhaps you should contact the Chief Sandwich Maker Dame Deirdre who by her own admission admitted she knew nothing about aviation or the Chief Executive who left the disaster at South West Trains.

A letter to Dame Deirdre from the Philip Hammond Secretary of State here. If she's not hacking it perhaps he's the person to inform!

[Cows getting bigger]

Perhaps I should. Looking at my iPhone enabled rant of earlier just reinforces my view that the whole affair is so frustrating and suffocating from an industry perspective.

Hammond's letter to Deirdre makes interesting reading.

[40&80]

I converted my FAA ATR licence to a UK ATPL in 1975...later having observed the newer CAA organisation staff at Gatwick compared to the staff they employed at the Strand in London...well... I never bothered with my British licences ever again..too much hassle and too expensive.

[turbine100]

Perhaps make a compliant via the ombudsman for public bodies?

The CAA is listed as a government organisation to file against. Below is the link for raising compliants.

Welcome to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

Also heard that some organisations would like to tryand get a government review of the CAA due to their services and pricingincreases.

[Whopity]

A Parliamentary Review of the CAA took place in 2006 details are published here But, that was 6 years ago and if we were to subtract the numbers of competent professional staff who have left since then, the picture would look very different today.

The most striking issue evident from the bungled paperwork and information they circulate is that nobody is in charge; nothing is checked before release and there are a number of loose cannons firing in different directions. In many departments there is no relevant professional knowledge or experience between the workface and the Chairman who by her own admission knows nothing about aviation. She can be looked up under Queen of Quangos !

[S-Works]

They are piling incompetence on top of ignorance.

I have a situation with one of our pilots who is transferring his licence from another EU country to the UK. Story is that he is old school pre JAA. When his country became JAA he was grandfathered and then subsequently grandfathered into FCL. So holds a full current Part FCL licence which he fly's for us on now.

CAA are requesting copies of his JAA FCL CPL exam results before they issue his new licence!! I pointed out that as he never did JAA exams how is he supposed to provide the exam results!

[Mickey Kaye]

Perhaps what worries me most is that they are so out of touch with the industry.

It’s been obvious for some time that the current questions are out of date and I would also question some of the content. What year was the Chicago convention – WTF has that got to do with safety?

I also felt that what was actually needed was the exams to be streamlined rather than increased in number.

At present the CAA actions are hitting my bottom line and I am seriously concerned that this will only increase over the next few years.

[Whopity]

I doubt that AOPA have made any representations to the CAA regarding exams since Des Payton tore up the AOPA agreement over 15 years ago! By only claiming to deal with them, the CAA are able to put the telescope to their blind eye and say "I see no ships" How convenient!

[Whopity]

AOPA administered the PPL Exams, the Flight Tests and appointed and controlled all PPL Examiners through the medium of the Panel of Examiners made up of FIEs. When the agreement was torn up, control of the Panel of Examiners moved from Capt Paddy King at the Bournemouth Flying Club to the CAA CFE in the Tower. A few years later the Panel faded away.

PPL Examiners used to issue pink chits to candidates when they passed and the counterfoils all went back to AOPA. Rumor had it they all finished up in Ron Campbell's garage! One or two examiners didn't bother!

[BillieBob]

It would appear that the UK CAA is in breach of EU law:

ARA.GEN.200

(a) The competent authority shall establish and maintain a management system, including as a minimum:
(1) ....;
(2) a sufficient number of personnel to perform its tasks and discharge its responsibilities. Such personnel shall be qualified to perform their allocated tasks and have the necessary knowledge, experience, initial and recurrent training to ensure continuing competence. A system shall be in place to plan the availability of personnel, in order to ensure the proper completion of all tasks;

So, perhaps someone should help them to comply with at least this bit:

ARA.GEN.125


(a) The competent authority shall without undue delay notify the Agency in case of any significant problems with the implementation of Regulation (EC) No 216/2008 and its Implementing Rules.

Of course, any means of doing this is a well kept secret - we can't possibly allow anyone to hold us to account!

[MrAverage]

OK. I've read the relevant sections of Standards Doc 11 and FCL-025 over and over, several times, to try and make sense of this 6 sittings thing. I've also discussed it with others who seem to read it differently. (I have to warn you that, although I managed Level 6 proficiency, I didn't get further than O level English)

The way I read it, if Bloggs fails Air Law on Monday and then passes it the following Monday, having not attempted any other subjects before or on either of those two days, he's used up two of his 6 sittings. He then has four full days left to pass the remaining six exams.

If, say, he then fails Nav twice - again having not taken any other subjects on those two seperate days - does he only have two sittings (days) left to pass those remaining six?

[keith williams]

The way I read it, if Bloggs fails Air Law on Monday and then passes it the following Monday, having not attempted any other subjects before or on either of those two days, he's used up two of his 6 sittings. He then has four full days left to pass the remaining six exams.

If, say, he then fails Nav twice - again having not taken any other subjects on those two seperate days - does he only have two sittings (days) left to pass those remaining six?

This whole matter depends upon what exactly will be the definition of a "Sitting".

You appear to be assuming that a sitting will be defined as "One visit to the examination room". If this really is the intention, then it will obviously cause the kind of problems that you have described in your post.

For many years JAR ATPL students have been required to pass 14 exams within 6 sittings. In the UK the exams were presented by the authorities in four-day blocks during the first week of each month. A sitting was effectively defined as "One examination week". This meant that 6 sittings added up to 24 examination days. This made it much easier to pass all 14 within 6 sittings, although some candidates failed to do so.

The new PPL system is clearly largely a copy-and-paste job based on the existing ATPL system. But the authorities do not appear to have thought it through very well. In the case of PPL exams for example the authorities do not manage the running of the exams, and it is unlikely that there will be any regular timing (such as once per month) for them.

I have not yet seen an approved definition for a "PPL exam sitting" but it is unlikely to be a single visit to the examination room.

[MrAverage]

Thanks Keith.

Rightly or wrongly I understood a sitting to be one day from this line in Standards Doc11:

"A sitting for the PPL and LAPL is defined as the attendance at an examination centre for the purpose of taking or writing a single or set of examinations in one day."

I sincerely hope my understanding is wrong.............

[keith williams]

I must confess that I hadn't previously seen that definition.

It looks like the "enthusiasts" who are putting this stuff together were not content that they had dug themselves into a deep enough hole.....so they kept on digging.

I understand that there is also to be a limit of four attempts at each exam. Based on the intended 9 exams this gives a total of 9 x 4 = 36 attempts. Trying to squeeze 36 exam attempts into 6 days is being a bit a bit optimistic.

Candidates chances of passing will now be maximized by going to a school that provides very long examination days.....18 hours or so.

[keith williams]

This guff is written for Euroland, where you have to go to a local CAA examination centre to do even the PPL exams. In Ireland, for example, you can only sit them once every two months.

Here is the UK they can of course be taken at the convenience of a student with an examiner who is the CEP at the local club.

You are of course correct in saying that "This Guff is written in Euroland", but the Standards Documents are the products of the UK CAA.

A "sitting" has always been accepted at JAR as being a one week period, so it would be be quite possible for someone to sit 3 or 4 exams in a week and use up only one sitting.

That was true in the past, but according to the latest version of Standards Document 11 (issued by the UK CAA in December 2012)

"A sitting for the PPL and LAPL is defined as the attendance at an examination centre for the purpose of taking or writing a single or set of examinations in one day."

As far as I can recall this definition was not in the previous version. The authors appear to have tarted up the document by adding some of the new EASA stuff.......Probably without considering the consequences.

If the CAA staff are awake (unlikely I know) they might well look at a PPL application form and reject it if the exams are spread over more than six individual days.

[BEagle]

Re. exams, from the AMC &GM:

AMC1 FCL.025 Theoretical knowledge examinations for the issue of licences

TERMINOLOGY

The meaning of the following terms used in FCL.025 should be as follows:

(a) ‘Entire set of examinations’: an examination in all subjects required by the licence level.

(b) ‘Examination’: the demonstration of knowledge in one or more examination papers.

(c) ‘Examination paper’: a set of questions to be answered by a candidate for examination.

(d) ‘Attempt’: a try to pass a specific paper.

(e) ‘Sitting’: a period of time established by the competent authority within which a candidate can take an examination. This period should not exceed 10 consecutive days. Only one attempt at each examination paper is allowed in one sitting.

AMC1 FCL.215; FCL.235

THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE EXAMINATION AND SKILL TEST FOR THE PPL

(a) Theoretical knowledge examination

(1) The examinations should comprise a total of 120 multiple-choice questions covering all the subjects.

(2) Communication practical classroom testing may be conducted.

So why hasn't the CAA complied with this....