Road to FI - Fifth and final exam sitting (CPL theory)

About one month and one week after the previous sitting, I was ready to give the last exam - Principles of Flight - another try. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Aviationexam, and greatly improved my average score there. This time I had a good feeling, but the pressure of this being the final exam made me quite nervous.

The reason for waiting more than a month was that we went on a three week vacation the day after I got home from the previous sitting. Having to study so much during the vacation did cause a fair bit of stress, and it felt like I wouldn’t be able to study enough. But I kept going, and eventually made it to the point where I felt my set exam date was doable.

A lot of studying

Aviationexam has been my most important tool since the previous attempt. I spent a considerable amount of time in the app, both at home, at the airport, on the plane when commuting to Oslo, on the train and in the lounge. The app is one of the reasons I’ve chosen Aviationexam - I can study and practice offline. It is also one of the few that actually have a filter for CPL only.

In total I’ve done 157 exams/study in Aviationexam, a total of 1834 unique questions (4879 questions in total) over 68 hours and 49 minutes - for Principles of Flight alone. For all subjects combined, the totals are 462 tests, 6567 unique questions (13 368 questions in total) over 196 hours and 9 minutes.

My average score in Aviationexam went from 64% to 89% - I also felt a lot more confident.

Back to my regular exam hotel

My hopefully last sitting had only one exam day (which was a first for me), so I went back to my regular exam hotel - Torp Hotel.

I left home early morning, so I would get a few hours for some final practice at the hotel.

Time to get this done

I woke up early Thursday morning, long before the alarm went off. After breakfast, and defrosting the car, I arrived early at the exam center. When they finally opened, I was the first to sit down at the exam computer.

The questions were, as expected, hard. Some I could recognize right away, and some I had never seen before. One nice thing about this exam, is that you have plenty of time. And I used as much of it as I needed. After going back to double check the questions several times, I ended up correcting a mistake i had made. I overcomplicated one of the calculations (got three of them this time), and even wrote a angry comment stating that none of the answers matched the real answer. Fortunately, I eventually managed to read the entire question correctly - and spotted my mistake.

When I reached the point where I couldn’t do anymore to improve my answers (a couple of the question had very ambiguous questions and possible answers, one of them had multiple correct answers as well), I submitted the exam.

I had a bad feeling, mostly because I was so nervous - this could be my last exam…

…and it was! The entire list was now green - and I could see a beautiful 89% next to Principles of Flight. The same as my average in Aviationexam for the last weeks.

It’s almost hard to believe, but this is it. I’m done! The official results came later in the day, as they have done for every exam:

A very different drive home

I was much happier on the drive home today, compared with last time. All the hard work has finally given me the result I wanted, and needed.

And hard it has been, very hard. Doing this all alone, without attending any courses, and without the encouragement you get from studying together with other students - is not something I will recommend. In hindsight, I would have been much better of simply paying for a full theory course. It would also have been cheaper. More about this when I write the summary for the entire thing. With everything, just the CPL theory and exams has ended up costing me more than 60 000 NOK.

I am lucky enough to have great people around me (both physically and digitally). Even though I’ve complained a lot, they’ve been there supporting and encouraging me along the way. Thank you. It has meant a lot to me.

Even though I had a long drive home, I even made it in time to attend the club meeting scheduled for this evening. And while there, I submitted the application to Transportstyrelsen to have my “LAPL only” limitation lifted. I will tell you more about Transportstyrelsen later, they are my new competent authority.

I also had to log in to the exam booking system, just to look at the empty list of exams. After a total of 19 attempts - I’ve passed all of the 13 required exams.

Even more key takeaways

In addition to all the previous ones:

• RTFQ! (Read the full question)
• Just do a theory course
• Get a mentor and some study buddies

What’s next

Now I’m just waiting for my application to be processed, and then it’s on to the next - getting the endorsement needed to instruct VFR night. But first, I’m just going to enjoy the fact that I’m done with this chapter. And work on the backlog of blog posts I want to write (some of them will be backdated to match the date of the event I’m writing about).

If you’ve followed along all the way here, thank you.

• PPL
• CPL-Theory