I passed my Navigation, Meteorology and FPP 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!