Hey all - another happy Bob Tait customer here, passed the IREX today with 90%, on the back of:

• nearly a year's worth of very part-time home study, in between full-time work, sports, life admin, etc
  
• reading the Bob Tait IR book three times from cover to cover - even on the third read I was still extracting new insights from it
  
• I bought one BT video and it was fine but I think I'm better at learning from reading rather than watching videos, so I didn't buy any more
  
• I bought the PilotPracticeExams IREX series - I would recommend them for the variety of questions and topics they presented, which was different to the BT practice quizzes and forced you to think about topics not necessarily covered in the BT quizzes, but I found the wording to be sometimes ambiguous or strange, the explanations sometimes not clear to me, and the answers a couple of times I actually thought were incorrect (although I'm no IREX instructor). The wording and style of the BT quiz questions was closer to the wording & style used in the actual exam.

I searched this forum for everyone else's feedback after the exam and collated it into a summary of tips, so thanks to that there were no real surprises for me in terms of the exam style or exam content. I finished in about 2hrs and spent the next 1.5hrs reviewing my flagged questions (about 6 of them, that took nearly another hour), and then quickly going through reviewing all questions routinely until the time ran out. When you do the exam you're in a room with people doing any other kind of exam eg PPL, CPL, etc, and so they might finish before you and walk out. I was the last one left in the room but the invigilator was obviously more than happy for me to use all my allotted time. One little suggestion would be, don't do what I did and hold back on the water to avoid needing to go the the toilet - probably better to stay hydrated during the 3.5hr exam for the best mental sharpness, and go to the toilet during the exam if you need to.

The questions I struggled with, and got wrong, were:

• Manual calculation of LSALT tolerance area when there is no ERC route - the question mentioned an NDB with rated coverage of 50nm at the destination, lines 50nm either side of track approaching the destination, and asked at what angle do the area border lines converge towards the NDB as you approach the destination. The fact that the area lines were the same distance off track as the NDB rated coverage confused me.
  
• SID radar procedure - the SID plate says "at or above 1500ft turned to assigned track" and the question asked about whether to allow for wind when given a heading/track at all times during the SID or only below 1500ft. The question mentioned both heading and track so I wasn't sure whether you would expect to be given a heading or a track when above 1500ft.
  
• I got the question from the BT book about being overhead an airport with a 30min traffic OPR and also a 30min weather OPR, and you only have 30mins spare fuel (apart from your final reserve). I couldn't find the reference in the AIP so I relied on memory from the BT book and put 'declare an emergency' but got it wrong so maybe my memory was wrong. I haven't gone back through the book to review this or any of my answers yet.
  
• And I was confused by a question about doing a DME approach and your DME fails at the FAF (5nm out) and what is the lowest altitude must you climb to in order to continue to overhead the AD. I thought you could continue at your current altitude until station passage and then conduct the missed approach, but the current altitude wasn't one of the options, so I selected the 10nm MSA, but apparently that wasn't the right answer either.

I was happy not to get any icing questions because despite lots of google and youtube searches I could never find a resource that helped me understand and remember the different types of icing from the different shaped clouds, apart from just rote learning.
Also I was happy not to get any 1 in 60 questions because even though I'm good at maths, for some reason I struggle a bit with them sometimes.
Thanks to the Bob Tait team and everyone on this forum who has been helpful.