Originally Posted by
inverted pilot
So I'm sitting here studying for my ATP written and I'm dumbfounded by how most of the aerodynamics questions are from the Aerodynamics for Naval Aviators book. I'm not saying the book doesn't cover every aspect of aerodynamics well, but I would use the word "overkill" on much of the knowledge presented. If you want to be an aviation engineer, sure most of it will be useful, but does an airline pilot really need to memorize and be tested on the specificity of a 7% induced drag increase in a 15 degree banked turn? While that 7% is great textbook material, it's fairly useless to a pilot. Certainly a pilot should know that drag increases in a bank, but knowing how to calculate it by using the formula 1/cos(bank angle)... I mean come on test writers, come up with things that apply to actual daily flying. Several questions about calculating distance to become airborne again after deciding to abort a takeoff... so when the captain touches down long and asks me if we should go around, i'll say hold on please, i need to calculate time for spoolup and acceleration, divide by 3600 to convert seconds to hours, then multiply that by our groundspeed and i'll let you know the distance for getting airborne again.
So many questions on this written that would be relevant if i was going to work in airplane design, but the info will be forgotten the day after the test when it comes to line pilots. Here is my favorite answer explanation for a question regarding high altitude turning performance... "The knowledge of this turning performance is particularly necessary for effective operation of fighter and interceptor type airplanes." Excellent... glad I'm being tested on things that don't apply to the operations I'm being tested for. I have a feeling all these FAA guys making the tests are former military pilots (all due respect, I'm former military too) and just pull these questions out of the books they learned from, not even correlating that airline and civilian pilots are not studying the same books. I would love to see many more questions about practical day to day operations and less high level engineering info that I can't apply in the cockpit without using a scientific calculator. It's so telling how irrelevant this stuff is when all the test study guides just tell you to memorize the answer because the math is too hard. Hey FAA test guys... make questions that are important to our normal operations, not just cool math formulas pulled from a PHD level aerodynamics book that only military pilots have read. Anyone else share my frustration with this?
Yeah the questions are kind of dumb, but if you've taken writtens or mil comp writtens thru commercial, they have probably asked you a lot of questions already. There is no question I use a small fraction, if that, of what they ask on the atp written on a daily basis in 121 ops, but I think, since they leave the question and answer bank such that you can easily Sheppard air the test (memorize the answers without really knowing the content), they just want to ask higher level questions, touching on new subject material (which is primarily higher/faster aerodynamics) and see if you can memorize the answers. I don't do a whole lot of math in my head or on a calculator in this job, and I think they know that. There isn't a whole lot other than that different from the instrument or commercial, though I never took those writtens so im not sure. That's the only thing I can think.
If they wanted people to actually solve the problems and not just memorize test prep software they would shuffle the answers in the answers bank. That fact shaped my view of the FAAs stance on the test. They did a decent job of covering the 121 regs though in the test I thought.