ATPL Flight Planning
16 Jan 2023
This is a topic that comes up often… what’s the best way to tackle the flight planning exam?
You’ve spent all this time studying, making sure you’re planning the most efficient way, let’s make sure you are sitting the exam in the most efficient manner.
You have 3 hours to finish it all.
Alternatively, starting on question 17 and working back to 1 is marginally better but still not great.
The reason is a few things: if you work from start to finish, you’ll be fatigued by the time you get to the hard 5 markers (which are worth 30% of the exam) and more likely to make mistakes.
Okay, I hear you say, “I’ll start at 17 and go back to one.” That’s good to combat the fatigue, but you’ve also got exam anxiety to think about. Do you really want your first question to a deal breaker in the exam? Probably not.
The last point and one of the more important points is the 4 markers. If you’ve already sat the exam before, you’ll know some of these 4 markers can take 20-25 mins. That’s a lot of time to only get 4 marks. Why not do 4X 1 markers in around 8 minutes and save all that time? You also have the advantage that if you make an unknown mistake, you won’t lose all 4 in one hit.
You will eventually have to get around to the 4 markers but let’s leave them to last. They give you “the least bang for your buck”, that is, they take the longest time per mark.
Take in the latest maps. Unfortunately, waypoint names change fairly often these days, but be sure to highlight your new ones before you go in.
Don’t redo questions at the end to “check if they’re correct”, the chances are you’ll find a discrepancy and then you won’t know which ones correct with seconds counting down… just trust that you did it correct earlier when you were fresh. (The exception to this rule is if you stuffed up and did OEI instead of depressurised for example)
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