EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW TO GET YOUR SPORT PILOT CERTIFICATE!

If you download and study the four documents below, you will certainly be ahead of the game in pursuit of your Sport Pilot certificate. Please take the time and familiarize yourself with the information below. The PTS document is the Practical test in book form. It represents everything that the examiner may ask of you while you take the check-ride. The Private Pilot question pool is the superset of questions that you are required to know in general. The Sport Pilot question pool is a subset of the Private Pilot question pool.

As well a formal curriculum is provided by several publishers of Test preparation materials. Our Test Publications provider is Gleim. We use Gleim because we feel that they have a complete and affordable kit with a good value. We encourage the purchase of a Gleim kit as it contains all the necessary booklets necessary for our Ground School portion of training.

TYPES OF GROUND SCHOOL: Self-Study Method | Formal Method   

Self Study Method
There are two different ways to complete your ground school training. The first option you have is to buy the self study-kit and study on your own. This is a lower cost alternative to formal accelerated ground school. The kit contains manuals and the computer based study method software CD's (a personal favorite of many.) The kit contains 5 books:

                                                 • Sport Pilot Syllabus
                                                 • Sport Pilot Flight Maneuvers Manual
                                                 • Pilot Handbook
                                                 • FAA Knowledge Test Book
                                                 • FAR/AIM 2005/2006 Edition

The kit also includes test-simulation software for your computer that allows you to unofficially take the actual test as many times as you want, a flight computer, a navigation ruler,  logbook, and a flight bag.  Studying on your own requires that you concentrate on The FAA Knowledge Test Book Material and  Questions along with the computer Test simulation software. The book is best used as a supplemental guide to the computer based study method. Obviously, everyone has there own preferred method of studying important material they need to retain for test taking purposes. One thing you will be happy to know is that most everything you study for in preparation for your test is all useful information and it will be used throughout your aviation career.

If you are completely unfamiliar with aviation then your best place to start would be the Pilot Handbook. This textbook is "A Comprehensive Text/Reference For all pilots" (it says so right on the front cover,...and it is!). What it represents is a condensed compilation of all the information you are required to know for Sport Pilot. That is a great thing because you do not need to wander through lots of books to gather certain information. Instead you will just thumb through pages in one book. And everything to aid in problem exercise's like flight computer and navigation plotters is included in your kit for your complete ground school training kit.

Once you have thoroughly reviewed the Pilot Handbook and are comfortable with the information that has been presented to you, begin immediately by going to the questions and answering them one by one. Once you have finished answering a chosen set amount of questions( i.e. 40 or so), go through the post exam results and choose to see which questions were answered incorrectly. At this point you will choose the option to review all the questions answered incorrectly. Answering all 732 questions correctly using the computer based method assures most a passing grade of 70% or better for the average pilot.

TIPs to help you study effectively on your own:
If you are using just the FAA knowledge Test Book to study for your examination then here is a useful tip you may want to try out. When answering the questions, if you at any time answer incorrectly, review only the correct answer and understand the reason why it is correct. Do not bother reading the given reasons why all other answers are incorrect.

Formal Method
In the accelerated Ground School, the instructor will assign reading and questions to be completed  by  the student in advance of each meeting date. Class sessions consist of 3 hrs of lecture followed on by 2 hrs of computer test simulation practice. Sport Pilot Chicago accelerated ground school is composed of 4 weekend sessions given twice yearly. The dates are floating and  scheduled based on need and attendance. They are scheduled to be held in the months of November and May. Please call for more information. We look forward to meeting you!