PPL Airlaw?!?!?!?!
 

Hi - I used the confuser to see how my knowledge was developing last night. I thought my knowledge was quite good regarding aerodromes etc and had been using an old Trevor Thom book. I couldn't believe how many of the up-to-date questions were on obscure ICAO articles and annexes - some based on international operations - is this the case in the real exam or are the first 100 questions or so in the confuser misrepresentative? Guess I need to know all the stuff anyway :bored:

You need to know the obscure stuff.
I used up-to-date Thom books ,answered the questions at end of each chapter,waited until I got most of them correct and then passed exams,.
I wouldn't have a clue about some of the more obscure stuff now!;);)
Good luck
Lister

I'd second that! From my experience if you can get a good pass (i.e. 80%+) on the confuser you'll be absolutely fine in the exam - this goes for all subjects and not just air law.

why do ICAO and the CAA require you to know such daft things, like which convention or treaty decided what.

I've just started ATPL law, it's a nightmare.

Good luck.

It's a licence to fly anywhere in the world (almost), so yes at this point the questions will seem a bit obscure.
The worst thing about air law is that you are expected to understand it before you experience the need for it.

Unfortunately I just scraped a pass when I sat my air law exam in 2006. Recently I re-read the Trevor Thom book and answered the air law q's in the 'confuser', still didn't get 100% :ugh:.

I guess we can all read different meanings into that Gemma.

Care to expand/clarify? Are you suggesting that the confuser should have questions which don't accurately represent questions that come up in the exam?

Did my air law a few months ago. The first 4 or 5 questions will be on the IACO laws and the Chicago Convention.

Unfortunately, the crap one has to learn for the PPL prepares one very poorly for flying abroad.

To fly abroad, one needs to pick up a whole raft of operational trivia which is not taught anywhere.

The best way to do a useful PPL is to "rent" an instructor for an extended holiday flying around Europe. The resulting course would deliver an excellent all around pilot who would have had a great experience but would cost perhaps twice the UK average of £8k - plus some means of feeding and bedding (for want of a better word) the instructor on the trip.

This is sometimes done in the USA, where an instructor and an examiner can be freelancers. Unfortunately, in the UK, the need to work through an FTO makes this harder, and anyway few UK instructors know about foreign flying.

The above is even more true for the IR. Nothing beats some flying around Europe, picking up loads of operational stuff which is not taught in any IR.

I've done both JAA and FAA standalone PPLs and their respective written exams so can relate both to real world flying, and neither is better than the other. The FAA written is a lot less revision than the JAA stuff. I don't think ICAO syllabus requirements are the problem.

Slightly off topic...but do any of you reckon there are private pilots out there who have passed all exams purely by remembering the Q's + A's from the confuser?...(And not doing any proper study? :eek:)

Lew747

You can't because they are not the same.

The Confuser contains questions which are the same style as the real ones. Occassionally they will be the same. But the multiple choice answer patterns will be different.

If you can revise from the Confuser until you are getting 80%-90% then you are sure to pass the real exams.

It's like the FAA exams - the question banks are public (as they are for the JAA IR) and you can do the same with those. But one cannot learn the answer sequences by rota because they get changed around.

I don't think this is not "proper study". By the time you are getting say 90% with these revision tools, you will understand the subject matter just fine.

"Proper study" might be reading the Trevor Thom books until you are blue in the face, and you will not pass the exams on that. The CAA exams are full of word tricks and quite a few of the questions are ambiguous - it would be difficult to pass the exams if you merely knew the subject! Moeover, the exams were written on the assumption that people swatted from certain material - again if you merely knew the subject from some other source (like having been flying for 40 years) you would have difficulty passing.

It helps to have a couple of things in the back of your mind. Most of the rules and regulations we have started from a logical source. However years of tinkering have removed much of the linked to the real work and now they are often simply 'rules'. So not much logic or justification.

Then we have the military or perhaps military thinking. We largely work in environments where people learn and then utilise skills. Much of the time in training is about generating those skills. The military and to a large extent the CAA and other quasi-legal organisations use the examination systems to select people. Not to establish skill levels but to wash out the 'inappropriate'.
Hence so many of the word games. It is a way of 'ensuring' that only people with a reasonable intellectual level can pass. So you learn the basic skill and then demonstrate a reasonable level of mental agility to pass the word games.

Will you ever need the answers to the questions in the exams? Almost certainly not - the only positive thing you can say is that the swopping necessary for the word games usualy means the basic undertanding of things like air law usually sticks!

Following on from this.
It is really,really,very important to read the exam questions carefully as they are quite misleading and confusing in that some of the multi choice answers are very similar.
Also when you have finished check all your answers against the question before handing in.
Lister:)

Yes one has to read the questions carefully as some are misleading.

That is the military way of doing things, because (in a professional air force in peacetime) you get 100s of applicants for every flying job. So you have to apply some pretty crude techniques to weed out the huge majority.

Unfortunately when this is carried through to the company which you joined after your RAF career in order to preserve your civil service pension (called the CAA) you can't chuck out so many people anymore, but nobody thought about changing the basic techniques.

That's why we have the stupidly elitist IR ground school - a huge memory exercise.

This problem is everywhere, not just in the UK, because the aviation regulatory world has always drawn from the air forces and the airlines (esp. the national flag carrier).

Offtopic, but this reminds me of a Viz 'top tip'....

"To avoid hiring unlucky people, automatically throw out half of CVs received without reading them!" ;)

I agree with you there Gemma. :ok:

Your earlier comment was written in the style of the confuser ... hence my question! :8

On the topic of the question styles; I noticed that as I have progressed through the exams I have found them gradualy easier. Possibly partly because the subject matter gets a bit more interesting, but also because I have learned the tricks they try and play on you with the wording of the questions and answers.

A personal favorite was 'How long is a JAR PPL (A) licence valid for?' The answer according to every book I read was 5 years, however the answer on the paper was 60 months.

It keeps the proles out.

(Or at least, it used to...).

Seriously though, as a pilot why does it matter whether something was decided in Warsaw 1929, Chicago 1944, Rome 1933 or 1938 Tokyo 1963, Hague 1970, or Montreal 1971? Surely all that matters is what the law is now?

And for that matter, why do we need to know where ICAO HQ is? anyone plan on going there anytime soon?

ICAO - formed in 1947 as a result of the 1944 chicago convention.

Who needs more than that?

The rest of the air law content is pretty relevant, types of airspace, rules regarding carriage of goods and so forth, but the history lesson is lost on me.

God, the air law was painful....

There are two consoling factors.. firstly, everything they ask is in the book. Know the book & you're OK - mightn't seem like much but its something! Secondly, the books (& exams) get better & more fun after that one.

Thanks
 

Thanks to all - good to know I'm not in a minority. Aside from the actual need for all the Chicago Convention stuff - having now read the up to date revision (think I was using a 1995 book initially from the local library as I wrongly assumed Air Law couln't have changed that much), it now makes much more sense as a lot of the ICAO stuff wasn't included. Future learning for others - get the up-to-date material!!!

Know of anyone who gave up because of the exams? No. And never heard of such a person, some who have struggled but none gave up.

We are a classic 'self-selecting' population. Because we 'want' to fly, we are motivated and will put up with an amazing amount of aggravation to do that. Which has a lot to do with why flying clubs are so rubbish at any sort of customer care and why we are prepared to put up with the 'word game' approach to the exams.

It's just a bit of a shame that when people have overcome all these hurdles and got a PPL they usually find the continuing aggravation more than they want to put up with.........

Wow, you must have had at least four 100%'s then :eek:
Just done Nav with just the one question wrong, that's 2 questions wrong in 4 exams so far.
I have been using the online practice exams at airquiz.com as well as the confuser. So far I have found:

Air Law: Questions were if anything more like those on airquiz. Easy enough if you know the source material, although (as has been stated) watch the dodgy wording. Oh, and yes you do need to read the supplementary material.

Met: Questions were very similar to those in the confuser. Airquiz examples were a little too easy I thought, actual exam was trickier.

Human Perf: All examples were easy, exam also easy if you know the source material.

Nav: Again the confuser seemed to have the more representative questions. The first 10-12 questions were based around planning a flight with 2 legs and an alternate. You spend the first 15 minutes marking the route on the chart (which was provided) and don't actually get any questions answered in this time. During the Nav exam, as for Met, I found that there were slight time pressures (i.e. I barely had enough time to check my answers).

The worst thing about the exams, IMHO, is the amount of study time required, sometimes it's not easy for me to juggle it with family and all the other stuff I'm involved in :eek:. There's a lot of reading, also I'm not blessed with a photographic memory so usually have to work quite hard at remembering it.

But it's still progessing as quickly as the flying at the moment, partly thanks to 'summer' 2008 :rolleyes:.

Gav.
www.madgav.org

Just joined that club ;)

I struggled with those questions in the confuser for exactly the same reason! Being 'too' safe :rolleyes:. Got it right in the real exam though.......
All the best for the 2nd part of your skills test, I seem to remember that you soloed just a few days before me or something, obviously you've made a bit more progress than I have since then :ok:

Exactly, I keep telling myself it will soon be over and it'll all be worth it in the end :)

Completely agree. My Thom books are 2003 issue and I've still come across a few bits which are out of date.

Passed my air law a few weeks ago, first go, 95%. First exam I have done for twenty years, almost to the day, although before that my life for ten years consisted of little else. I still occasionally wake-up in the morning panicing that I'm not ready for my university finals!

Don't know whether this will help anyone else but this was my method for Air Law:

- Buy the AFE book, 2007 edition (unless a 2008 one comes out!). I bought another book from a different publisher as well as the AFE one and the other one was out-of-date.

- Read it as many times as you can stand, in chunks small enough that you don't doze off. Mark-up the key facts and also cross-refer the airspace and VMC minima diagrams and text.

- Do all the practice questions in the book. They are nothing like the exam but make you think and hence really learn.

- When you have mastered the above steps, buy the exam secrets book. Do the questions and study the answer explanations until you have them clear. Do not do this stage first as it will teach you enough to pass the exam but nowhere near enough to be safe let alone legal.

Good luck

Joe

If you know the topic properly, you'll pass the exams.

If you want to find a short-cut, good luck to you, but you'll be found out later in your 'career'.

Most of these daft books are about learning the short cuts without studying the topic.

/Rant ON

Air travel operates as it does now because of ICAO. Without the Freedoms we would not fly as we do. Without Chicago and the Annexes we would not fly safely.

Do credit to the folk who sorted this out with blood, sweat, and tears, and at least humble yourselves enough to find out about it...

...because none of you will ever, ever, achieve anything like what they did...

/Rant OFF

G-EMMA, you said Well, so do I. In particular I like to moan about people who think that 20 minutes with a book of questions and answers should qualify them to fly.

I quite like to moan about folk who don't know why aviation has been breaking down borders and barriers for years.

I love a moan about those who can't be bothered to research why commercial aviation achieves such impressively low levels of risk around the world.

So sorry to introduce a spot of wheat to this particular chav - sorry, chaff - conversation! :)

OK, this is a bit OT, for which I apologise to the OP (I think this thread's run its course anyway & I don't think it's worth starting a new one), but today's flying activity was a wee bit more 'interesting' than usual:

Link

Quite an experience for a first landaway :}

12 x 5 = 60

I don't get the point you're trying to make ?

The gotchas with these 'duration of' questions is that some entitlements run for X days, some run for X months, and some run for X calendar months. On the last one, an entitlement obtained on say the 15th of the month runs until the last day of the month of expiry. A real sod to remember. Especially as some of the 'X days' entitlements don't start counting the days until the first day after the entitlement was obtained.

Of course the questions are phrased to trap the common and easy misunderstandings. The #1 job with CAA exams especially is to read the Q several times.

The original question was about whether there was a point to having to learn about ICAO and other 'obscure' topics.

I'm with frontlefthamster on this. As a PPL, you'll proibably only have to pass an exam on Air Law once and thereafter your licence will qualify you to fly throughout pretty much any part of the world. Many countries have their own local variations to international standards but in order to understand how these variations affect you it's important to know what the baseline is (or, at least, where to look it up). I guess the exam is an attempt to ensure that, maybe 20 years after you took the exam, you'll have a chance at finding some information that has suddenly become important.

Sadly it doesn't seem to work because it it quite clear from other threads, for example the one which started on RT phraseology, that many people don't understand the basic ICAO rules and to appreciate what are local variations and thus are unable to pursue a reasoned discussion on the subject.

I agree that the licence is an international one, and therefore you should learn international rules. However, the syllabus is full of which convention decided what, and what would you find in the AIP.

Ultimately, the AIP and AIC are reference documents. I think you should be able to take them into the exam, and they ask you specific rules to show you know how to use the reference material correctly and not misenturprate it (i'm sure the spelling police will be onto me about that one)

knowing that something was decided in tokyo in 1963 doesnt really help that much.

Whislt exams are well and good and show someones ability to take info onboard they are no indicator about how the person is going to perform in the role.

I get a lot of Grads come through my Dept at work and you would be surprised how many havent got an ounce of common sense! I had a Grad with a 1st in Maths from Oxford nearly have a breakdown on me after just 4 weeks as he was dealing with situations where he couldnt find the answer in one of his textbooks!!!!

So whilst 98% in exams may be nice, you may be worse at the actual role (pilot/engineer/doctor/etc) than the person who just scraped through. So knowing 98% of jack sh1t doesnt really come into it if you can't practically deliver the role required of you.

J.

Which is why you also havew to do skills tests to obtain and maintain an aviation licence.

The skills test does not include an oral exam, so why have the theory with all the rubbish in it?

The FAA licenses include on oral exam (2-3 hours in some cases) but then the theory is much more sensible.

I've got my Air Law exam on Monday - I've been putting it off and off. Would anyone who has done it recently have any tips further to the above?

I've read the book and done all the confuser questions but I'm still a bit unsure. Not the most exciting subject is it?

When in doubt, the correct answer is either the longest answer, with the most legalese, or C.

If you consistently score good marks with the confuser, then don't sweat. Just get up there and do it.

Goodluck Trident , ive got mine next week:uhoh:

Had mine today scored 82%

Was pretty straight forward! :ok:

I read the Jeremy Pratt book and also had the confuser

I made a few silly mistakes which COULD of cost me a pass

So make sure you read the questions carefully!

Conk