Take-off trouble

Updated on: Wednesday, March 16, 2011

If one goes through the Airline Transport Pilot License (ATPL) exam results, the failure rate would stun any outsider. As one speeds down the list of roll numbers and marks scored, the word ‘fail’ appears with such frequency that it is very easy to spot an aberration — that is, a ‘pass’ mark.

“Among all the subjects, it is Air Navigation which gets the highest failure rate. Results of the past two years show that only 5-10 per cent clear it,” says a ground instructor who coaches ATPL students.

The high failure rate does not mean that pilots are generally a lazy lot. Even for the pilot who opts for the fair route, the going is very tough in the country as far as clearing CPL or ATPL exams is concerned. “In countries like the US and the UK, the aviation regulator has set a well-defined syllabus. There are question banks with like 1, 500-odd questions for each subject,” says a US Federal Aviation Administration pilot licence-holder. “In the US, for instance, students study from Gleim Question Bank and the computer randomly selects 100 questions from this for the exam, which can be taken every week and not just once in three months like in India,” he says.

In India, on the other hand, the syllabus is loosely defined and several books on the reference books list given by the DGCA are no longer available. “So, one comes across strange questions in every subject for both CPL and ATPL exams,” says a pilot. Air Navigation questions also carry numerical — sometimes about 50 per cent of the marks go for numerical. “There will always be a couple of numerical that will have inadequate information, some will have a convoluted language, making it all impossible to mark the correct option,” the pilot says. Another adds, “In India, the candidate has to leave the question paper with the DGCA, he cannot take it home. There is this huge secrecy that surrounds questions.”

In the UK, on the other hand, one can pay the aviation regulator and say, get the list of questions that appeared in the 20 exams or so, he adds.

Take-off trouble

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