olympic

When I am talking about flying I mean the 'Training' students go through in order to pass checkrides according of course to the PTS, also the way General Aviation is set up in the states because unfortunately General Aviation is almost non existent in Europe due to restrictions and the expense of flying. A lot of these European schools actually send their students to the US to build time.

When I say ground school, I don't mean a specific school, I mean in general the FAA testing is ridiculously easy. The JAA on the other hand makes you sit in school for a minimum of 6 months accumulating hours before you are even allowed to sit an exam. Oh and you won't find a Gleim book handy ..

Sniper

I'll second that the FAA written tests are 'horrible'. The written tests should test whether you have an understanding of the material you're being tested on, not whether you can memorize the answers. I watched one pilot take the commercial written in 5 minutes - they scored above 95%, but I doubt this pilot had mastered the material, or read a single question (how could they? They spent an average of 3 seconds per question!). This pilot could pick the right answer just by looking at the options available . Impressive? Yes, but I'd rather see mastery of the material rather than mastery of memorizing 700 or so different answer options in a pilot.

My solution - the FAA question bank needs to grow much larger (harder to memorize), and the same 4 answers need to be applicable for multiple questions but with each question yielding a different correct answer, forcing the test taker to answer the question, not remember the answer.

Is this the most pressing change needed in the pilot certification process? Nope.

RiddleEagle18

Your logic is slightly flawed here. There was a large supply of pilots so they were able to raise the mins to 2000TT. Thats why they had no trouble filling the seats. Much like it is today.

This law would require 1500TT wether there is a large supply of pilots or not. When the supply of qualified pilots in no longer available something will have to give.

USMCFLYR

Riddle -

Something will have to give. Let's hope that it is the wages available to a prospective professional pilot during a career that will make the initial sacrifice worthwhile. Maybe then some will ask themselves "is the juice worth the squeeze".

USMCFLYR

atpcliff

Hi!

I took the Conversion Exam, which is 100 questions. The hard part is it covers all 14 exam areas, and the questions are randomly generated from the 14 exam areas...one of the online question banks said there were 23,000 questions from which to pull the 100 questions.

You CAN go online and find ALL of the CAA questions to study from! Not so easy, though!

cliff
LFW

DAL73n

I beg to disagree, the military writes off aircraft in accidents on a regular basis.
I also remember a foriegn aircraft crew who could not tell the difference between a takeoff warning horn and the 10000 foot cabin warning.
Major US airlines display and accident rate substantially lower than these two examples.

Expirience is a good thing and things done before airline flying are often much more outside the box and therefor develop more stick and rudder skills and judgement than the daily flying by the numbers airline environment can.[/quote]

There's one little sticking point in your argument. Military Training to put pilots in the right seat of a crew airplane or single seat fighter aircraft is 18 months of full time (5 days+/week) ground and air training. Civilian programs don't match up to that. Let's not compare military to civilian training. Also, Let's not forget the extensive pre-screening to even start pilot training in the military. Last I heard anyone can enter a civilian training program.

stoki

To do the conversion, unless you have Airbus or Boeing time, with international hours (and I believe this is only the UK CAA anyways), you have to sit 14 JAA written exams.

Not one conversion exam of 100 questions, but 14 seperate written exams, covering 14 subject areas.

A GIANT P.I.T.A, I'm doing it now.

No Gleim books handy..

The FAA tests were a cake walk compared to this.

Sniper

Most of readers of the 'majors' forum (like 'atpcliff') have international Boeing or Airbus time (with the possible exception of guys @ Southwest, but many of them have it from previous lives). So, does this time need to be PIC time, or is a certain amount of time required? Can military time count (C-5 or F-18) or does the time have to be in a civilian aircraft (KC-10, aka DC-10)?

Sorry I'm asking, but, for a lot of us, the JAA license might have just become a good deal easier to attain. What am I missing? If it was just a 100 question test (no matter how hard) more guys would be doing it, I'd think.

TonyWilliams

There's a different threshold for the JAA tests if you have a certain number of either total hours, or PIC hours. Sorry, don't have the regs easily available.

Also, if you convert your FAA to Canadian (very easy), then you take a reduced number of tests (I believe 4) to convert to JAA.

stoki

iirc the JAA conversion regs talk about converting an ICAO license to a JAA. Canadian is ICAO, I don't think having a Canadian license changes anything.