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.

perhaps they realized their mistake and awarded everyone points for the questions where graphs were needed? Happened with IAA with my PPL exam - Air Law I think it was, they made a small booboo with the pictures not matching questions, admitted the problem quickly and rectified the situation accordingly..

oopsies and booboos happen everywhere, no doubt.. it's just how you deal with them and how likely you are to admit the problem in the first place is what makes all the difference

No, this was genuine cheating....

ah ok, I re-read it now and I see what you meant.. my case was different, like you genuinely could not answer a question and it was a paper based exam.. My self and some others just wrote comments on the paper leaving the answer section blank

Hello all,

I'm currently wrapping up studying for 5 exams which I will take in 2 weeks. I took and passed all the exams 8 years ago so I'm wondering how much different the exams will be this time around. I've been using aviation exam so far and have been able to work out the answers (not memorize).

Since the learning objectives haven't changed I'm assuming the questions are variations of the same stuff. That being said however I'm interested to know if banks like aviation exam cover questions for all of the learning objectives. Otherwise I would need to go through the books to cover everything.

No, they are not - there are plenty of new ones and Ops has almost completely changed. For that you need EASA Doc 965/2012.

Phil

How can one learn for an ops test which would have completely changed ?
Did they change the rules (answer to old questions) or did they just add new questions ?

Is there a book that would be good enough ?
I don't think it realistic to read the hundreds of pages of EASA official documents..

I will be taking my OPS exam in about one month or two : could there be a huge difference between my aviationexam database and the real thing ?

Thanks !

KayPam

Advice : Read EASA Doc 965/2012. and use aviation exam questions , ops exam is an easy fail exam

I plan on answering all aviation exam questions at least once

The concept is not to learn the answer to each question but to learn the material behind each question, whenever I did not fully remember this material from the books (or whenever it was absent from them, which can unfortunately happen)

Salut Kaypam.

Simply do the BGS QB for OPS.
It is uptodate. All my fellow and I got +95%.
Good luck

Unfortunately my school provides aviationexam, nothing else.
Is it up to date or not ? Anyone ?

I could also buy the cheapest (one week) BGS subscription, just to confirm if I see some newer questions or not.

The meaning is to LEARN stuff and not about memorizing QB.

QB is a great tool to check where you need to study more. And to answer few of those tricky questions. However, if you DO study, you will pass the exam, no matter how many new questions they make.

My advice - don´t waste 6 months memorizing "a" or "b". You may pass the exam now. But what will you answer on tech interview, when asked to explain how ILS works?

Don't get me wrong, I will never learn by heart the answer to a question. At the minimum I will try to learn the table of data behind it. (Don't forget we're talking about air law and ops here..)

EXCEPT when it's the only solution to do so !


There are a few questions that can be answered with common sense, yes.
But my ops book is 5 years old. Imagine any numerical value (be it the minimum number of passengers to require 1 fire extinguisher, the visibility circling minima for cat D aircraft or whatnot) has changed, in a newer set of EASA questions : how I am supposed to cover for that ?

Plus, I know full well there is a significant amount of questions that won't be easily answered using only the books*. Probably not enough to fail me, but largely enough to get me under the very important 90% threshold, that will allow me to apply at flybe (among other airlines, I bet)

(*Example : the right to damages is lost if action is not brought within which duration ? no trace of that in my book, but it was in BGS online QB)

I also don't know what to do when the answer given by the QB is wrong.
Like yesterday, avexam told me sideslip angle (not drift angle) was computed by INS/IRS..

Will we have open questions ? These are more complicated to answer because you can't guestimate if you don't know, but they're a relief in cases like above.

The liability question is feedback. The issue that I repeatedly highlight in these discussions is that the syllabus does not properly reflect the question bank, or vice versa, and therefore some element of feedback is essential. In this case the LO is

010 01 02 05 Explain the Conventions and Protocols designed to cover liability towards persons and goods in accordance with the Warsaw System based on the Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules Relating to International Carriage by Air, Warsaw, 2 October 1929.

...and the 2 year limitation is in Article 29 of the Warsaw Convention. But without the feedback who would know that EASA require you to remember this? Are the candidates expected to remember all 41 Articles? A proper LO would be "State within which time period a claim under the Warsaw Convention must be brought?".

PS The airbus IRS does compute sideslip, for example google A310 Flight Instruments, FCOM pages 10, 16 &17, side-slip index (and beta target). With due respect to your theory provider they should know this, and that the 2 year time limit has been asked.

Alex,

What is your honest opinion when it comes to LO's like the one you've just given as an example?

Do you feel it is of any actual value to a Pilot in his day to day role?

Are you as frustrated in teaching these things as students are in having to rote learn passages from law textbooks?

No, I don't think it is of value to a line pilot, how could it be? We get frustrated not so much by having to teach this, as by having to deal with questions like this that cannot be anticipated from the learning objectives. It is tremendously unfair on the candidates. Paco will tell you that another review of the LOs is underway. The intentions are good and, if done properly, it is a move forwards but it will not address the root problem, which is lack of adequate quality control when questions are added to the CQB.

Hear hear! My concern is that, having done the LOs, that the questions will be ignored, even though they are adding new ones. I will be bring this up at the next meeting. We can all work around even the current LOs, but nothing can prepare you for the surprise irrelevant question that has the loosest of connections to them.

Phil

Oh yes, I've had an epiphany while re-reading this message.
The ball will indicate "sideslip" by actually giving you a measure of the lateral acceleration.
The IRS can compute lateral acceleration as well and try to deduce sideslip.

However it is not an optimum measure of sideslip.
Say you are rolling on the runway at 100kt, with a 5kt lateral wind.
The IRS won't notice a thing, if correctly compensated for, but there will be a 3° sideslip (or so)
In flight, I do reckon that there is a lateral force equation. Cy can be deduced from LAT_acceleration=QSCy
The, Beta can be deduced from Cy=Cyβ*β + Cyr*rb/2v +Cyp pb/2v+Cydn*dn
That is not exactly a measure, that is a complex computation :lol:
It would be an estimation based on the aircraft engineering model.

I've noted a few other questions which are typical of why I will do the entirety of my question base :
https://gyazo.com/414b7c0abbded745620a05280c09079a
If you are still at the intercepting heading once you're on the lock, since you can't instantly change your heading to the LOC heading, you will overshoot and be in for a new LOC capture. One should not re-try to intercept it at constant heading..
https://gyazo.com/663edad82a76222433332b5f0b32f91f
This question deserves a plain WTF?
I would definitely write the keyword "inversion" on my exam paper if I could, or even write the answer in plain words, if possible. I'm not sure the computers will allow that.

Most basic autopilots I've used do overshoot, especially on VOR coupling, hence my preference for using the heading bug and doing it myself. It's only the more modern ones that have an element of anticipation.

What's wrong with the second question? Simply remember Extra Chicken Tikka Masala (EAS, CAS, TAS, Mach No). Whichever one is constant in the climb, the one on the right is increasing, and on the left decreasing. The reverse for the descent.

Phil

Oh ok, I did not know older autopilots could not anticipate :eek:

For the second one there is something clearly wrong.
In the general case the answer is right, yes.
However (!!) you could be climbing through an inversion ! This would revert the variation of Mach (TAS is assumed constant, not CAS here)
Is there a way to tell the autority (examiner or automated correction algorithm) my short explanation based on the keyword "temperature inversion" ?
So how can I know if EASA wants me to be super rigorous or to talk about the general case ?
This is typically why I will do the entire QB before going to the exam.

The answer is they miss out the word "usually"!

it's the sort of daft question you should query.

That is, assuming the QB have got it right. Frequently, queried questions are found not to have been reported correctly, so the feedback is not accurate.