Will someone please tell me why the FAA Commercial Pilot Knowledge Test includes 14 questions relative to ADF, but NONE about GPS?
Mind you, those 14 questions include a series of -- at least to me -- nearly-incomprehensible questions requiring the strangest drawings I've ever seen. MH, MB, RB, from, to, blah, blah, blah. I think it's been years since I was even in an aircraft that had an operable ADF. And that may be part of the problem: An utter lack of real world use of the ADF, so I can't relate the questions into any actual experience I've ever had.
I hate to take the lazy way out, but I may just opt for rote memorization of the answers to these questions, as even the material from which they are derived (according to the source attributions in the Gleim study guide) aren't much help.
(By the way, Gleim references Chapter VIII of the Instrument Flying Handbook. But that chapter deals with the National Airspace System. Methinks they really meant to cite Chapter VII, "Navigation Systems.")
5 comments:
seems like most of the answers to the ADF questions is double the time between stations :)
I'm doing practice tests as well. I got caught the other night by a question about the forces in balance for descending flight. I got it 'wrong' but the explanation included the phrase 'in level flight'. Oops.
oops indeed, I meant equal to the time, not double
Those I got, no problem. It the ones that require you to reference Figure 16. Oh, and the HSI questions are killing me as well!
I found that just drawing pictures was the most helpful for me with solving these questions. They blow my mind, too. The presentation is just awful. I also can't read an altimeter display that's printed on paper.
-C.
Seems like all the aviation authorities throughout the world delight in putting together examinations with obscure and irelevant questions.
My PPL test here in Canada included some doozies .. I vaguely remember something in the meterology section along the lines of asking about some obscure cloud name.
My ppl ground school (2000) included only brief mention of GPS.
No real flight training on it, as only a couple of our planes had a GPS :) I bought the manual and taught myself the basics ..for VFR nav only.
From reading the PPRUNE.org website, it seems that in the U.K. GPS is also not taught, and thought to be an "evil thing" :)
Guess it's kinda like morse code, that was only recently removed from the radio amateur (HAM) testing.
My commercial ground school was also a joke, basically a duplicate of the PPL ground school, just fullfiling the "hours" requirment for Transport Canada.
Mike
Post a Comment