New EASA ATPL questions
 

Where should I start this?


I had my first batch of EASA ATPL exams in The Netherlands.

After months of preparing and going through the question bank, ATPL ONLINE, I thought that nothing could go wrong from this point. I was scoring between 95-100% on the question bank each time.

After I took my exam, I couldn't believe what just happened... Literally half the exam consisted of questions that were not in the ATPL ONLINE question bank.

When I got home, I did some re-search on to why so many questions are not in the question banks like other people claimed they would be that have finished their theory exams years ago.

I stumbled across the EASA site where they mentioned that since 2015 they are 'slowly' replacing old questions with new questions.

Has somebody else experienced this, and what did you do? Perhaps switch to a different, more up to date question bank?

Let me know!

PS: If somebody knows a good, accurate and regularly up to date question bank, let me know!

Unfortunately you have to LEARN the material and use the question banks as revision.

Aviation EXAM you should have picked

EASA are trying to get rid of the database learners, and not before time.

You can answer 30% of the questions just with common sense and PPL knowledge anyway. Despite the fact that a proportion of the questions are poor*, you should still be able to pass with proper training and knowledge.

*2000 per year are being reviewed.

That's why they are taking active steps to change that after all this time.

hello Paco,

Currently doing my EASA atpls (validated half of the subjects so far), I will have few questions regarding CAA updates:

Do you know when the new question reworded will be implemented this year ?
I heard about beginning of February, do you confirm ?
What's about the new written questions which are also planned to be implemented this year. Do you have any clue about what it will consist?

Thanks for your feedback and happy new year :)

I just finished my ATPLs last month. The majority of the questions are new and you wouldn't have seen before, but i found studying really hard let me answer them anyway.

But, ATPL ONLINE is the worst question bank to help you study, mainly because they don't remove the questions that are wrong.

Use Aviation Exam or Bristol Ground School's question banks. You still wont see everything but the explanations are better and the exams are more representative.

A positive of EASA changing the question bank is they are also removing the ambiguous or really nasty questions. Every question i had over the entire exams was fair.

Beginning of Feb, confirmed - will include the new Performance Based Navigation stuff in 062 07. Otherwise, just variations on the same theme. As before, no new questions have been written for LOs scheduled for deletion in the future - mainly filling in gaps that have not been used before.

FlyANA - looks like something is working, then! :) To be fair to ATPL Online, removing a wrong question from their bank doesn't remove it from EASA. Maybe you mean they don't remove questions that are not asked any more?

Thanks Paco for you feedback.

Hopefully, I already booked my AGK, INS and RNAV end of this month. Hope there won't be any update. I was not aware of the new stuff in PBN, I attended my brush-up course 10 days ago and we were not told about it.

BTW, thanks again for your previous feedback regarding OPS and the 965/2012. I literally printed it and learned it by heart and scored 95%, was really useful.

Yes that's right. EASA will remove poor questions from the official bank, but they will remain in the ATPL ONLINE question bank.

As Keeflyer said, there is a huge difference between having the appropriate knowledge and answering the questions correctly.

I remember my General navigation exam consisting of roughly 40% of new questions.

I had to double check my paper to make sure they didn't accidentally give me Performance.

The new questions are sometimes not very hard to answer, but other times they ask you ridiculous things.

Sorry but I find your post to be quite arrogant.

Did you actually walk into that exam room genuinely believing you didn't have to learn any of the material and could simply rely on third party, non-official, commercially run question banks to pass an exam?

Recipe for disaster. Every time. I've seen it first hand, one idiot failed a subject that had new questions and his solution was to.....not look at the textbook but simply run through the question bank again. Failed the subject a second time.

The key is working through the textbooks and then consolidating with a question bank product. Aviation Exam is quite good and has excellent official question inspired revision notes for some subjects.

Also on this subject a word of warning. I know first hand of a cadet on a sponsored mpl scheme getting let go by his airline, entirely stopping his chances of becoming a pilot because he failed an exam three times.

His method of studying was to do, according to him, 2000 questions a day. He had the entire bank memorised.

I am certain that if this guy had read the textbook, had extra tutorial lessons and learnt the theory then he would be flying by now.

Hi Paco - sorry but i have a stupid question!!

When you say new Performance Based Navigation stuff in 062 07 - are you referring to the Radio Nav exam (062) and the Operational Procedures exam (071)?

Other than study study study..... any other nuggets of wisdom to get through ATPLs?

Thanks Alex..... so if i have understood that correctly the new PBN stuff is only going into Radio Nav?

Yes, the issues are (i) that Annex 1 to the ED only requires amendments to the IR syllabus but the amendment clearly shows it as applying to the ATPL syllabus as well (ii) the timescale for introduction is confused, the CQB certainly has not got the PBN questions in it as of now.

The UK CAA appear to be suggesting a phased introduction school by school with two sorts of Radio Nav exam available, one with PBN and one without, while the introduction is in process. For my money it would be easier if they just gave us an introduction date with sufficient time to teach the material before the exams go live. There appears to be a further requirement for current ATPL or IR holders to complete PBN training (and presumably an exam) as well.

Annex 1 to ED

As someone who has 8 atpls done and 6 more to go (so roughly right in the middle of it), I agree that there are some very bad exams and very bad questions, but not all of them are the like. I was sitting AGK for example, couple of weeks ago - lots of new questions, I'd say a good 1/3rd not in your QB, but they were good, decent questions, nothing bar one question, really phased or shocked me - if you read your book and do your revision courses, you will do fine! At least this works for the vast majority of people

The goal is to understand the subject - what's the point in memorizing the QB? There's no QB for your job interview, so you might as well get the most out of your ATPLs simply to be prepared..

that being said, QBs are really valuable and I will admit, that even thou I understand the subjects, I wouldn't have first time passes in all subjects so far with out them..

Thanks Alex!

Martin 123 = I just hope there is a distinction though between learning the question bank and using the question bank! I guess i will find out next week!!

So for me for example, i have gone right through the Bristol course and would not go past a subject unless i had a good understanding of it and could pass all the progress tests / quizzes. However, now i have finished that its all about exam preparation - i am now doing the whole question bank - any answers that i get wrong i am looking at why i got it wrong. My hope is that this will mean i am prepared for the exams and new questions. So i hope this falls into the category of using the question bank.

When you say learning the question bank from that i am thinking people actually just try to remember the answers?? But then in GNAV for example you would be pretty screwed if up pops a calculation type question with totally different numbers and you didnt know how to do the calculation!

You're quite right, learning the answers doesn't work for all exams, but there was a case of someone doing AGK who finished it in ten minutes and still passed. This is not what we are trying to achieve!

Still, EASA aren't the only ones - a couple of years ago, Transport Canada mistakenly issued performance questions A with performance graphs B, and everyone still passed. Go figure.

I agree that many many questions are very poorly worded.
However, this is NOT specific to EASA ATPL, I've studied on two continents and many institutions and there seems to always be questions that are intrinsically overcomplicated.

The one thing I particularly dislike is having to choose between 4 very close definitions of the same things (except if the differences made a sensible impact)

My method is the following : spend half the time on reading the books, then half the time on aviation exam.
Do you reckon that intelligently answering could lead to proper success at the exams even with an entirely new set of questions ?
Intelligently answering :
- if answering is evident (and chosen answer turns out to be correct) : just get on the next question
- if answering is not obvious: thinking about it, why not make a few calculations (not to do on the test day, just to understand things better) and answering
- if after all this chosen answer turns out wrong : reading in depth the explanation or even the book again if forgotten

The one advantage I see the QB is the possibility to have a global overview of my progress: what's the % of questions I correctly answered, how many more % to go, for each subject ?
Plus, if the answers to the QB' questions are not to be learnt by heart, but discovered, and answered once (for most of them), then it's like discovering questions on the day of a test.