My PPL Journey

Learning to fly, one lesson at a time

I passed my Navigation, Meteorology and FPP theory exams!

2022-12-22 PPL Theory Exams

It turns out that the lesson on Tuesday was my last for the year as we binned this morning’s lesson due to low cloud. So, like any sane person surely would, I booked my Nav, Met and FPP exams back-to-back for this afternoon and spent the morning in revision and mock exam mode :cyclopsani:

Nav: 16/16. I started with Nav as it’s the one I’ve been studying the longest, and putting much of that into practice with the navigation flights I’ve been planning. As with the first three exams, I found the actual questions much less taxing than the Easy PPL mock exams. Maybe I got lucky, but it seems there are a fair amount of trick questions or “clever” answers in the Easy PPL question bank that didn’t come up at all in the actual exam.

FPP: 10/12. I’d only started passing my FPP mocks on Easy PPL this morning so I wasn’t as confident going in as I was with Nav. The first question I dropped was on 032.01.04.01 - Climb and cruise performance - Use of aeroplane flight data, which I remember was just a lookup with a small adjustment for farings and I thought I’d got that one right. The other miss was 033.01.01.02 - VFR navigation plan - Courses and distances from VFR charts*, which was almost certainly a simple measurement of the distance from Norwich to Framlingham and I can’t for the life of me work out how I’d have stuffed that one up. 😜 Clearly there are still areas of FPP that haven’t stuck in my brain so I’ll spend a bit more time with Easy PPL over the Christmas period to see if I can internalise some of the weaker bits.

Met: 16/16. I’d been really struggling with the motivation to work my way through the Easy PPL Met slides, and the Met section of my Pooley’s book remains undisturbed. In the end, I found these two videos from the world of hang gliding and paragliding covering Met theory and whacked them on in the background whilst cooking, and that seemed to uncork the bottle. After that I was able to quickly blast through the slides and was passing the mock exams from the first attempt (Note for those following: Don’t squint trying to read the screen from the videos; the slides are available for download from the video description. Also note there’s a mistake on the typical wind direction for polar maritime - it should be SE not SW)

All’s well that ends well, as they say, but I’m going to make a concerted effort not to leave my final 3 exams to the last bloomin’ minute. One at a time at a leisurely pace will do nicely, thankyouverymuch!

First theory exams passed!

2022-08-12 PPL Theory Exams

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.