I used the PPL tutor app and found it very good - always with me for a quick exam practice should I have 5 minutes. I also liked the way it presented some of the more confusing info - VMC minima, airspace classes etc.

I also used the Pooley's book of questions, and some example questions from my school and having been through them all three or four times, plus dozens of times on the app I passed with 90%. Did the Op procedures the following week and scored 96%.

My only bugbear is I have no idea which ones I got wrong, and therefore what topics I'm not so sharp on. My school said the CAA don't allow you to know, which sounds odd?

PPL Exams App
 

Good Evening all,

So what is the BEST PPL Exam app?

I'm currently following PPL Tutor but it's hard to know how good it is as i'm yet to undertake and pass the test but the content and the way it works is great.

Does anyone have any experience of this app? What do you all recommend?

PPL Exams App
 

Ppl cruiser was good for me. About £2 a subject I think.

See: http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/Informa...ice2014147.pdf

It refers to the new PPL exams which come into force on 15 Oct 2014.

Don't you just love the opening line - "In keeping with our commitment to remove unnecessary gold plating of European regulation....". This, of course, should read, "In order to comply (belatedly) with EU law....".

Unless I have misread the notice, the only change is a reduction in the number of questions.

The six-sittings rule still applies and there is nothing to suggest that any new questions have been introduced, nor that any of the questions have changed. Indeed if I recall correctly, a previous post by BEagle indicated that the questions will be changed at some time in the future. Presumably when the CAA have lots of spare capacity.

This hardly justifies previous posts such as the one quoted below.

Is this really the best that the new CAA GA department and AOPA can achieve over a period of a year?

The industry/CAA WG sent its proposals to the CAA in Jun 2014, hardly 'a period of a year'. The proposals included a reduction in the number of exams from 9 to 6.

AMC1 FCL.215; FCL.235 are purely recommendations; strictly speaking they are not 'EU law'.

I have asked why the number of exams has not been reduced in line with the WG's recommendations; personally I consider retaining 9 to be 'gold-plating', although perhaps only 9 karat.

EASA does not require any specific number of exams; it merely states the subject topics.

Are you allowed to state what the industry/CAA WG proposals were?

9 papers 6 sittings 10 days is still a dogs breakfast

And is anyone able to confirm that the new questions are actually relevant to flight training?

I hope this isn't yet another wasted opportunity by the CAA.

Well the current exam system was introduced in September 2013 and agitation for change commenced immediately. The CAA then set up their new GA Department in October 2013.

September 2013 to mid-October 2014 is pretty close to one year in my book. But if you and the rest of the GA Working Group wish to tell yourself that the rate of progress has been good, then that's fine by me. But that kind of approach makes it virtually certain that real progress will never be achieved.

As a very vocal member of the GA Working Group perhaps you could explain:

1. Why the arbitrary figure of 6 exams in any more relevant than the old arbitrary figure of 7 exams or the current arbitrary figure of 9.

2. In what way have the "itoys" as you call them now "become useless" as you predicted in an earlier post in this thread. Or where you just trying to put people off buying the APP?

The first national attempt to change the system was in July 2013, before the CAA went through its perestroika session. Agreement to go ahead with the LAPL/PPL WG didn't follow until much later.

Why 6 exams? Well, if you take out RT theory and that 'headshrinker horse$hit' of 'Human Performance', you're more or less back to the way things were before even JAR-FCL came upon the scene.

Also, the 6 exam format agreed closely with the days of CAP53, when a more structured theoretical knowledge requirement was in place.

As for 'sittings', the long term objective is to get rid of them as they serve no useful purpose. But that cannot be achieved at national level alone.

Are you the vendor of the iToy exam 'app', or what?

Not at all, in fact I have never seen any of the PPL exam iphone APPS, and I don't even own an iphone! I certainly wouldn't know how to create an iphone APP of any kind.

I can understand why you don't like them, and personally I have never liked any product that does not include meaningful explanations. Whether or not the "iToys" have such explanations I do not know. As I said I have never seen any of them.

But your apocalyptic posts concerning impending changes to the PPL exam system would be much more credible if you made them more realistic.

BEagle

I have to say that I'm desperately disappointed with this result. Is taking out a few questions really all that could be done with this abomination of a system?:ugh:


MJ:ok:

About 43% fewer questions, Mach Jump.

What other changes would you like to see?

The Americans have been showing us how to do this for decades.:ugh:

A single exam covering all the subjects, with a large, published bank of sensible, relevant questions. Each exam individually created from the published question bank by a random selection of questions from each subject area.

The Exams would be administered online by any Flight Examiner who would have to be present to invigilate the Exam, and identify him/herself to the online system with a PIN. The results would be automatically recorded at the CAA. (The system now used by AMEs to administer and record the results of Medical Examinations could easily be adapted for this purpose.)

Candidates could be recommended for the Exam by their Instructor, also with an online PIN, and 6 attempts (They could be called 'Sittings') would be allowed.


MJ:ok:

Ps. Flight Examiners could also use the system to administer and record Flight Tests.

I understand that the US is moving away from the 'published question bank' system....

Incidentally, the proposal is indeed to introduce sensible, relevant questions based on the forthcoming PPL/LAPL AltMoC.

Phasing exams so that they are relevant to the student's level of training is surely more logical than the 'guess/forget' method of 120 multi-choice questions on a computer.

That statement sound rather ominous.

Are the working group actually pushing for this to become mandatory? It all sounds very logical, but even the ATPL integrated courses have moved away from this idea.

To maximize the number of people taking up PPL training the whole thing needs to be made as flexible as possible. Introducing unnecessary restrictions will simply hasten the decline of GA.

It sounds to me like we have created a committee and the committee is now doing what committees invariably do....designing a camel.

The road to hell and all that........

.....and towards what? A secret question bank?

All that does, is promote the creation of commercially available re-creations of the 'secret' question bank, which then become available as Apps, and then the only real question will be ' Which App is best?'

Oh, I think that's where this thread started! :rolleyes:


MJ:ok:

keith williams wrote: No. The better flying schools do this anyway and having multiple exams ensures that such flexibility will be retained.

The flying schools can only have the three sets of exams that are issued by the CAA.

Even if they had more than three sets of exams this would not provide the kind of flexibility that is required.

Many potential PPL candidates have real lives with real businesses to run and real families to support.

For some the option of taking a short intensive ground school course followed by all of the exams, before starting the flying training is the option that best fits their "real life" needs.

Some schools include the PPL ground school as part of a degree course. This usually involves a structured program of classroom training within the first semester, with the flying being done at some later date. In many cases this is not just a case of "memorize then forget" but involves study that is of a far more detailed level than the minimum required by EASA.

Some people wish to get all of the ground school and exams done before going off to do an intensive flying course.

Your idea of staging the ground school and exams to match progress in the flying phase would prevent all of the above options. But it would tie candidates to doing the ground training and exams with the ATO at which they are doing their flying training. This would be a good money spinner for the larger ATOs but the smaller ones would be unable to provide such a service.

Your answer above just illustrates the fact that you you do not understand what is actually needed. The people that we are talking about are not 1950's RAF Cadets. They are paying customers.

As I wrote, the better schools can integrate relevant theoretical knowledge with the stage of flying training being undertaken at the time - if they so wish.

But if people wish to do the groundschool and exams first, before they have any real idea about what the topics really mean, that's up to them. That became increasingly popular amongst those who wanted to do some intensive PPL course in the US after having first passing their exams in the UK and I'm not convinced that this was a satisfactory way of learning to fly.

Quite why anyone would pay £999 for an intensive 5 day course to take their PPL exams, when they could take them at their leisure during structured PPL training, with a far better understanding of the content, is a bit of a mystery to me.