Do pilots study for the Annual Pilot Test?

Do pilots actually study for the annual pilot exam or do you guys don’t feel the need to?

Peter,

There is no such entity as the “annual pilot exam”. We do go for recurrent training and a check ride every 9-12 months (depending on the airline). I try to stay on top of studying all throughout the year, because one never knows when they might have to actually use the information. Here is an article that I wrote about airline training: https://airlinepilot.life/t/airline-training/27

Chris

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Thanks Chris, I’ll take a look at the article

Peter,

As Chris said we do recurrent training yearly (in fact I just got scheduled for Aug) and yes I study for it. The fact is there’s tons of information we’re responsible for knowing, and while I try and keep myself sharp throughout the year, there’s nothing worse than looking stupid in front of your peers to motivate you to do some cramming!

Adam

Chris,

I tried clicking on this link to read your article and found the error message “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.

Brady

2 Likes

Peter,

The best pilots are the pilots that are always learning, that includes reviewing information that may have faded overtime.

Tory

1 Like

Brady,

The link worked for me. The article is in the “Flying the Line” section of this forum.

Chris

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I see. Is the recurrent training/checkride hard, and do you guys stress out about it?

Peter,

Nothing you shouldn’t be able to do on any given day so I don’t think so. Some pilots do stress about it though.

Adam

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I see. Thanks for the response!

Peter,

I only have three years at Horizon. The first couple recurrent sims stressed me out. I always over prepared and I just didn’t know what to expect. Now that I’ve done a few the less stressed I’ve become.

Tory

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Okay, well it just seems so stressful that your career depends on those things.

Peter,

Well, albeit true, it is expected to have a healthy amount of stress. Some of the training is routine, such as takeoffs, landing, approaches…but the scenario-based training is intended expose pilots to difficult yet realistic scenarios that typically allow for more than one way of solving “the problem” so to speak. That, to me, puts me at ease, knowing that there’s more than one way to safely accomplish the mission.

Tory

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Peter,

Your life depends on those training events, not just your career. Everything we train for we do for a reason, usually because some accident has happened in the past. When something goes wrong in the air, you will be darn glad that you trained for it in a simulator first.

Chris

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Alright that makes sense. Thanks for your response!

Oh YES SIR I will be glad! Well, I know that plane crashes are super rare, but are minor problems rare too?

Peter,

Things pop up from time to time. Some minor, some not so minor. More times than not the way the pilots deal with the situation has alot to do with the outcome.
The reason the airlines created CRM (Crew Resource Mgmt) back in the 80s was because there had been a number of crashes of perfectly good and functional airplanes that started as fairly minor gliches or errors and the pilots somehow mismanaged them so poorly they became catastrophic. Often the scenarios we’re given are fairly harmless and the goal is simply to not make them worse. There have been too many times when pilots created their own emergencies.

Adam

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Wow! I didn’t know that. It’s pretty scary how things start from minor errors…

Peter,

Perhaps? To me it’s actually comforting. The reality is the chances of a plane suffering a mechanical or structural failure that would be so severe as to cause a plane crash is actually extremely minute. With that in mind if me and my co-pilot are well trained, communicate effectively, are paying attention to the task and don’t freak out, the odds of us having a really bad day at work and ending up on the show Air Disasters is almost non-existent.

Adam

2 Likes

Thank God you say it’s rather comforting. Hopefully, nothing too serious happens to yall. :smile: