Hi Everyone. A bit about me.

My names Matthew. Thanks for all the comments etc that people have given to my questions. I find the Bob Tait training and forums to be invaluable.

I've taken a long route to being a pilot. I had my first flying experience at the age of 16. It was a surprise birthday present from my mother, but I didn't start lessons till I was in my mid 20's. It seems doing an electronic apprenticeship, cars, and girls got in the way of me focusing on flying.

I took my lessons at Aldinga in Sth Aus. Back then it was a couple of dirt strips and a school run by an ex police officer called Peter Whellum. I got my GFPT there, but after finishing a degree in information systems, I move to Sydney, to work with a large bank and flying again took the backseat.

After a few years at the bank, I decided to get back into flying and took more lessons from a flying school at Hoxton Park. This time I got close to getting my PPL. I had a load more hours, including a cross country with my instructor from Hoxton to Aldinga and back and had done close to the require solo cross country hours, but then I gave up working at the bank and did something completely different, moving to South Korea to teach English.

Working in South Korea was a great time. Great friends, a great culture and teaching English at two kindergartens was so much less stressful than all the corporate bank politics. My time in Sth Korea took up another 6 years of my life. By this time I was approaching 40. In between then and turning 50, I had a number of different tech jobs in Adelaide and in the USA, but never really had the time or money to get back into flying.

After returning from the US in mid 2019, I decided to use some savings to finally get back into flying. I went back to Aldinga, where the great guys at Adelaide biplanes have transformed the tiny flight school into something really amazing. I got signed off on my RPL, did a nav endorsement and controlled airspace endorsement and am currently studying the CPL theory in an effort to bypass the PPL and go straight from RPL to CPL. I only have another 60 hours or so of command time to get, and need to do Performance (which I've already failed twice ugh!!), Aerodynamics, General Knowledge and law.

The only other thing I do right now, apart from being a carer for my mother, is create Kids YouTube content, of which quite a few pieces are on aviation. If anyone would like to help or has kids in their family. Feel free to subscribe, which will help me get closer to being monetized. Matty Crayon - Educational videos for kids

PS, I'm looking for anyone who can help me get behind the scenes at Qantas to make some videos about big, bigger, biggest planes

Subscribed.

Regarding exams I suggest doing one step at a time. Performance is time consuming exam and you need to be very quick. Practice and precision are the key.

I suggest doing high mark questions first, then do the 1pt questions as last. Make sure you use your own calculator as I have seen people asking examiner to borrow a calculator, which takes away precious time to learn new buttons, display, etc..

Reading Performance book from cover to cover and doing all examples is a must.
It also helps subscribing to pilotpracticeexams and doing their tests as well.

It takes double the time to learn in our age, however it is doable.

Good luck with exams!

Unfortunately I can't help you with the Qantas (nor Virgin, Rex..)

Thanks for the subscription and the tips. That point about the calculator is a good one. I had a different one, that I took, in the last exam. That may have contributed to a couple marks lost.

Next time I'm gonna be hyper vigilant to the possibility of every small error causing thing.

Cheers

If I may offer some comments, as aircraft performance is one of my professional engineering areas of specialisation.

Regarding exams I suggest doing one step at a time. Performance is time consuming exam and you need to be very quick. Practice and precision are the key.

Very true.

I suggest doing high mark questions first, then do the 1pt questions as last. Make sure you use your own calculator as I have seen people asking examiner to borrow a calculator, which takes away precious time to learn new buttons, display, etc..

Indeed. More importantly with the questions, regardless of what order you might choose to attempt them, follow a time/mark schedule.

By that, I mean, prior to starting the exam, figure the sum for each question - minutes/mark - so that you allow for all the questions and their values. So, for example, if an exam has total marks of 100 and you have a time limit of 120 minutes, take off a bit to allow for checking at the end, say 20 minutes, and then you MUST maintain no worse than a schedule of 1 minute/mark for each question from when you start work. So, if the first question you do is worth, say, 5 marks, you ONLY spend 5 minutes on it before going to the next question. Providing your competence is up to speed, you will lose a minute here, gain one there and can finalise any question you have discontinued at the end.

What you are trying to do is maximise your potential total mark. There is not much point in spending heaps of time on one or two questions and getting full marks for them if you fail the paper because you only attempted 30 percent of the questions.

Reading Performance book from cover to cover and doing all examples is a must.

Success relies on two things -

(a) knowing the subject material. That is a matter of study, study, study.

(b) having a high level of competence in answering likely questions. That is a matter of practice, practice, practice

It also helps subscribing to pilotpracticeexams and doing their tests as well.

I know of PPE but, not having seen any of their work, I can't offer any comment. I have heard, though, that they claim a student pass rate of something like 99 %. Mmmmm, I think I'd really need to see some validation of that sort of claim !

It takes double the time to learn in our age, however it is doable.

Isn't that the truth ?

That point about the calculator is a good one. I had a different one, that I took, in the last exam. That may have contributed to a couple marks lost.

I'm a bit of an heretic. Being an old chap, I was brought up on longhand and then sliderule calculations. Electronic whizz stuff didn't appear until I found myself at Uni. One of the problems for younger folk, these days, is that people are brought up on electronic stuff and the buzzword of note is "GIGO". Be very wary of the ease with which you can key in nonsense stuff. Especially, you MUST develop a skill in figuring checksums to keep an eye on silly keystroke mistakes - ie, is the answer suggested by the machine somewhere near to where you expect it to be ? If engineers were just to accept the display answer without independent checks, we would have bridges falling down all around us ....

There is NO problem using a navigation computer (which, really, is a basic slide rule). Providing you are practiced and skilled in its use, the answers it gives will be in the same functional accuracy region as the 20 decimal answer given by your calculator's display. Plus, you will make fewer errors on the wheel and you get the answer quicker !

Next time I'm gonna be hyper vigilant to the possibility of every small error causing thing.

The mantra is "practice, practice, practice".