ATPL Online

Here's a short introduction to one of the secret weapons used by flight students helping them to cope better through the CPL and ATPL theoretical examinations.

A King Air in the front pages contributes to motivation nicely. Recently it has been replaced with an even better source of motivation, the A380!

ATPL Online is an online question bank, which you can use to practise for the different theoretical subjects included in the CPL and ATPL syllabus. The bank contains more than 10 000 different multi-choice questions, which are taken from the same question bank used in the real examinations. So with this online site you can practise questions either by category, by random or by doing mock exams that work the same way as the real ones. If you answer a series of more than 20 questions you can get your score to show on a recent progress table, which shows your progress as a linear graph. With hard work this graph is then supposed to show an upward trend...

The only graph I had the nerve to post a picture of :)

Using ATPL Online has many benefits and here's three of them:

Firstly, by doing hard work and taking the questions you always learn something new from the subject you are rehearsing. There are lots of situations where the same question is asked multiple times and as a result you'll begin to remember the answers easily. Especially all the different questions which have a sort of "rule of thumb" to remember them by, like relationships between IAS, TAS, CAS etc., compass errors and certain laws of aerodynamics, can be quite easily mastered by repetition.

Secondly, answering the questions in the bank helps to develope answering technique. Although one might think that a multi-choice question with four alternatives wouldn't need much technique, there's actually quite a lot required. With frequent rehearsing you'll learn to avoid the most common traps and you'll also begin to pick up important clues from the questions. By trial and error you might someday also learn to read the whole question before answering. Actually, the most important advice I've received considering the theoretical exams is a rule of thumb called RTFG. It stands for "Read the F.... Question". Works pretty well, and if all else fails the correct answer is the longest one, or option C, or in case of Principles of Flight, the one that contains the word "fowler flap".

Fowler flaps is always the right answer, regardless of the question asked :)

The third benefit is that with hard work and answering thousands of questions you'll eventually learn quite a large part of the correct answers by heart, without even thinking what is asked. This is very useful as you'll encounter the same questions in the real exams. Additionally, if you just can't get some certain things in your head, you can develope your own rules of thumb and memorize the questions and answers by heart. After all, it is sometimes much easier than actually working to undestand the subjects in depth. Of course, this only works for a small amount of little pieces of information contained in subjects. For example, if you just can't work in your mind the relationship between two things, then just remember that if the question has "increase" in it, the answer is "decrease" and so on.

This is again one of these questions... deepest?

ATPL Online doesn't come for free. You have to pay for registering and I subscribed for 90 days with a price of 74 euros. You'll certainly get your moneys worth and I think we don't have one student who didn't subscribe to this service.