First theory exams passed!

As mentioned last week, I’d opted to take a break from lessons this week whilst my instructor was away so I could knuckle down and prep for the first three theory exams that are required by my school before I can fly solo: Air Law, Operational Procedures and Human Performance & Limitations.

Air Law: 100% or 16/16. I’ve shared on this forum that the sheer weight of information in Air Law (and the proportion of which was of, IMHO, questionable usefulness that I had to fight my brain to retain) had me a little worried on this one, and I spent nearly double the time on this subject versus the others so feel as though I earned that perfect score. Definitely still need to work on airspace classification regarding separation and traffic information in the C, D & E range, but I can do that at my leisure and I understood enough to answer the relevant questions when they came up.

Operational Procedures: 92% or 11/12, so one question incorrect on 070.04.01.04: Smoke in the cockpit. The question related to the cabin filling with smoke with an acrid smell, indicating an electrical fire. There were two similar answers I was prevaricating between, with one adding “open the window and discharge fire extinguisher in the direction of the smoke”, and while I was fairly certain discharging a fire extinguisher for smoke was a bad idea I couldn’t believe that the right answer wouldn’t include opening the window. Turns out the answer was the other one and I should have trusted my firefighting instincts.

Human Performance & Limitations: 83% or 10/12, with 040.02.01.02 Vision and 040.04.01.02 Perception highlighted as deficiencies. Looking at the syllabus and cross referencing with Easy PPL and the Pooley’s book I really can’t think of a vision-related question that came up so…. shrug. The Perception one was almost certainly about approaching a runway, feeling the nose was high and no perceptible loss of speed followed by a hard landing. The option I picked on the cause of the hard landing was the downsloping runway (which was explicitly mentioned in the scenario given) but I now suspect they wanted me to say that it was caused by a high roundout (i.e. error) rather than the thing that triggered the error.

So, that’s the first 3 exams out of the way, and that plus my Class 2 medical on Monday hopefully clears me for my solo when I’m ready. Other than the mysterious vision question, I’m comfortable that I know enough about these subjects that I can take a theory break to focus on the flying, and I can save stressing about the next three until I’m nearing digging into the practical side of navigation.

Given the heat, I’m going to celebrate with an icecream and (later) an ice-cold cider or two! 🐷 I’ve cancelled my flight for Sunday as it’s smack bang in the hottest part of the day and I have an aversion to melting, so next lesson is Wednesday next week.