ATPL Maths & Physics Topics
 

Good evening Pprune,

Despite having a safe, well paid & enjoyable career, I’ve decided to embark on the ATPL journey in the early stages of 2024 with BGS.

Whilst fully aware that a Maths & Physics refresher is provided with the course, I’m spending some time over the next few months brushing myself up on areas not touched since schooldays.

Is anybody able to shed some light on areas that really will help once enrolled on the course? From my understanding, trigonometry is one useful subject to be up to scratch on.

Many thanks!

Speedbird91.

Distance, speed & time leading into fuel calculations. Being able to re-arrange basic formula including cross multiply. Trigs - SOHCAHTOA, Pythagoras. Though usually you might use a particular trig function in a given ATPL syllabus formula. Make sure you master your calculator, the Degrees/Minutes/Seconds key is really useful in GNav for Time, Latitude & Longitude problems. Linear interpolation of table data & working out what scale a graph might be does seem to cause some problems. The gas laws in physics are worth knowing.

Best of luck & have fun!

RichardH - retired instructor.

Hi Richard,

This is perfect, exactly what I was hoping for! Many thanks for the detailed response,

Take care,

SB91

And be very particular and careful about your decimal points and orders of magnitude !

In the ATPL maths questions, many of the wrong answers they offer have the same digits in the same order, but with the decimal point in different places. So be very careful, it is too easy to select an answer with the 'correct' number but the wrong decimal place.

It tests your attention to detail as well as your calculations.

Hi Uplinker,

Fantastic advice, many thanks. I have heard horror stories where exam sitters have been too keen selecting their answer, and then missed marks purely due to what you mentioned above, and not putting focusing on the location of the decimal.

SB91