Ryanair typically have been asking candidates on the phone about first time exam passes. Of all my students, the ones who said that they did not have all first time passes were not offered interviews. Sure the exams are a bit ridiculous, but when you have 8000 applications, it is just a filter, but as far as I have seen, Ryanair is one of the few airlines asking about ATPL exam passes.

Ooops, I guess I should have seen a doctor years ago :p

is it really 8000 applying?

3000 at least, as the cae website said.

Passing the exams at first attempt is useful because firstly is allows you to move on and secondly, it's cheaper. Needing more than one attempt may also preclude you from "working" for some companies. However, let's be very clear: The content of the exams is little short of diarrhoea. It's applicability to modern aviation is so marginal at to make it worthless. An hour or two on YouTube might be more useful. MEL's, actual met. data (who really cares about the name of the wind - that sort of thing is for a pub quiz) and computerised flight planning have replaced the somewhat optimistic "best guess" approach used in the past. If however, you start working for a company operating in the past (and/or Third World) then your knowledge is still wasted because you'll still be doing it their way.

Exams are just a step in a rather (at the moment) pointless path to getting a license.

Agree with that. I still passed CAA exams 12 of them till now first time, but I noticed they are changing the questionbanks. It is quiet annoying. Ofcourse you have to have good book knowledge, because that you will need in interviews, but even with that its hard to score above 90. I can tell you, at home I scored all the time way above 90, but exams below 90. Even had Rnav exam lately. 66 questions. 16 of the questions ive never seen.

So what I try to say. Maye sure you read the book well. First do questions to see where focus is on. Because you dont have to know every letter in the book. Just have to know how things work.

So good luck, but take ur time, because of changing QB.

Maybe in what you fly. But even working for a UK company I found alot of it useful.

Nope NAV doesn't change neither does the technical. And if you bust an Annex and pick up pax in the wrong place you could end up in some ****e hole prison praying that the company man will spring you and they won't just send another crew and get the plane and leave you.

Maybe if AF477 pilots had actually understood what they were doing and the principles of flight they would still be alive.

mad jock
 

have you ever been at fl390 in the night with turbulence with loss of airspeed and 47 master caution alarm in 1'30s?
Do you know all the 330's crews in all the company try to recover the situation at the sim, and most of the crew recover the airplane between 6000 and 9000 feet?

don't joke about this, please.

Fulminn, if that is the case, then there is a serious problem with either all the crews in the company, or the flight control system of the airbus.
I know which my money is on.

I ain't joking.

And it ain't funny that basic concepts and skills are getting washed away by automation.

I had a pitot system icing problem in cloud and turbulence a month ago in the climb.

You won't find it in any of the incident rags.

Because after I pitched up 2 degrees to 14degs the airspeed was still rising when I would have expected it to come back by 10knts. So I ignored it and went back to my normal climb attitude and made sure all the pitot icing gear was on as well as the airframe then had a look at the FO's ASI which was reading what I expected. Then gave him the rest of the sector and grounded it.

Had I not known that attitude plus power equals performance maybe I would have continued to pitch the nose up until we stalled then hauled back on the stick defeating the stick shaker and then told the FO all the way down that I don't understand what's happening.. Who knows....

yes, ok, P+P=performance, but with all the other sounds and warning probably would be much complicated to comply with this simple rule...just this!

Nope its your job to be able to see through the smoke and tackle the fire. Its the reason why you call yourself a professional pilot.

In the main we are paid to be there for the very rare occasions that training and knowledge will save the day.

Without knowledge the BA 777 Captain at Heathrow wouldn't have reduced the flap to get rid of drag flap to give him a longer glide range. If he hadn't the plane would have crashed in a residential area and taken most if not all of the pax along with ground casualties. He managed to pull that knowledge out of his head with a twin engine failure Which I suspect will have a similar numbers of alarms and lights flashing as AF477.

That simple rule saved hundreds of lives, and more importantly it saved his own.

As has been pointed out ones ATPL theory exam results are often used as a filter to get you the interview. But then you must too be prepared to answer technical questions should you be invited to interview. Most operators will know that question banks are heavily relied upon to help pass the subjects and as such may not ask about your exam results directly but possibly ask some ATPL theory questions to test your real understanding and knowledge.

Hammering the question bank is no way to properly learn the subject rather more to help one understand how the CAA is wording and asking the questions. Some questions are worded so ambiguously or even poorly translated from other EASA member states, that it is almost impossible to understand what they are asking! Learn the subject content properly before attempting the question banks and use the banks to test your knowledge not to memorise the answers.

Disagree. If the sounds and warnings affected human performance to the state where he cannot remember to push forward in a stall then these alarms and lights would be significantly reduced in cockpits.

POF is the most important ATPL subject in my view, and POF is definitely a very useful subject in day to day flying. Sure you might not care much for the advantages of a T-tail if you fly an aircraft with a conventional tail. Take the ATPLs and then apply it to what you will be doing day to day, I for one will never re-learn polar stereographics in GNAV unless I'll by flying in an area where it's needed.

Thread drift.
One of the issues with AF447 is that the systems logic deselects the stall aural alert off as it is configured such that if the speed is less than (eg) 60* kts then the aircraft must be on the ground. Thus, as it was stalled and with a very low airspeed, the aural alarm did not activate.
However, when he briefly relaxed the back pressure, the speed increased, alert became active and thus the pilot did what was previously keeping that alert quiet...

*I don't know the actual speed, but it's quite low.

Back to topic.

I've never been asked for first time pass exams results for any flying job.

to re-join the thread, i'm working with an irish based 737 company, and they ask me the paperwork with the results of the exam. all first attempt.

mad_jock I have the feeling it's been quite a while since you took these exams. Perhaps it was even so long ago that you had to take written exams and study a meaningful syllabus.

If that is the case, I strongly suggest you try to get your hands on a few 2012-2013 question databases and try to get some answers in there. I believe you will be 'amused' to say the least ...

I was in the first rounds of JAR when all you got was a 40 photocopied sheets from the cadets that had written the questions on the back of the CRP 5's so you had no option but to learn it.

The syllabus hasn't changed that much. I do though now have 10 years experience behind me though to use some of that theory.

"Maybe in what you fly. But even working for a UK company I found alot of it useful. "

Even Canadian companies. Flying around N Alberta, I use convergency all the time as part of my mental arithmetic.

As far as the syllabus goes - yes, a lot of it is stuff that really should be on a Flight Engineer's exam. The rest of it you will have to know at some stage - or at least you will know it by the time you retire! EASA likes you to know it up front, as you will have a licence that takes you into many countries. I don't have a real problem with that - as a TRE, do I ignore part of the check ride because I know the candidate doesn't do that in his job? No, because my signature entitles that candidate to be a professional pilot - I don't know where they will end up.

And anyhow - flat knowledge is worth 30% of problem solving time in an emergency. You can't get enough of it.

But the sad truth is that you cannot pass the exams on knowledge alone. You have to use the databases to practice using questions that are riddled with bad English, bad punctuation, misspellings, multiple correct answers, multiple wrong answers, some in the middle - in short, it's a major SNAFU and an international joke, for which the perpetrators should hang their collective heads in shame. Here is an example:

"ESSENTIAL TRAFFIC" is that controlled flight to which the provision of separation by ATC is applicable, but which, in relation to a particular controlled flight is not separated therefore by the appropriate separation minima. Whenever separation minima is not applied. The following flights are considered essential traffic one to each other."

This is a quote about a recent navigation exam from a very experienced military pilot from the USA undergoing a conversion.

"For the Nav I found that a number of questions did not offer the actual solution. I was using a Jep CR-3 computer which gives slightly different answers than theirs. I then did a spot check on a number of their problems solving them by trig. The trig is really only GCSE level (sin/cos/tan, and then the law of sines). What dumbfounded me was NONE of their answers were correct. I am at a complete loss of what to do with this. All the wind problems were Euclidian so really quite simple. Also, I don't use the 60-1 small angle approx since I had a calculator (and the CR3 does trig nicely) and they are very quick. Even with these simple ones, they did not have the exact answers, with the correct answers almost smack in between two others.

For my next attempt I am at a loss for what to do. I the correct answers is not correct, then what kind of arbitrary, just happen to be the answer they found are they looking for? To they understand that in this simple math there is exactly one answer? Do they understand the difference between accuracy and precision? These too have tight definitions, but that seems to be lost on them. They seem to be happy with precision being that they all get around the same wrong answer, but either don't understand the simple math or don't care how to get accuracy. Unless they are going to specify the exact model of flight computer, to include the date of manufacturing since tolerances change, how can they do this? Perhaps I should send them ISO 5725."

No amount of knowledge will get you through the exams with situations like the above.

I thought they did specify a whizz wheel the CRP-5.

I did actually think at the time my crap grammar and spelling and certain traits of being Dyslexic actually helped me with the exams.

Maybe not the biggest offenders, but this is of the top of my head:

"The inner layer of a windscreen is made of: a) soft polycarbonate b)glass"

"The ILS uses frequencies in the : a)VHF b)UHF"

Depending on your definition of "inner", you start to understand most of these questions require a skilled usage of a lucky coin flip. Consider that some of the tests consist of as few as 25 questions, which means you can lose up to >10% of your score simply by getting a few "unlucky" coin flips.

I have attended cooking classes that have more professional tests.

No idea how much of what I learned will be useful or not, I do not know that. What I do know, what I am saying, is the tests are low quality.