Build a Better Pilot

The new airman certification standards (ACS) are a comprehensive framework to making it through the knowledge, oral, and flying tests required for many pilot certificates. For the past few decades, all oral and flight tests had been conducted within the scope of the practical test standards (PTS), a guide that detailed the items to be tested and the standards to which applicants would be held. The ACS is similar in that it includes each of the tasks and performance standards in today’s PTS. Now, instead of having only a standard primarily focused on skill, each task lists knowledge areas related to that task and potential sources of risk.

Steep turns are a great example. The PTS said that to pass steep turns, an applicant had to have knowledge of a steep turn; roll into a smooth bank; stay coordinated through a full turn with 45 degrees of bank; divide attention between inside and outside; potentially do it in both directions; and maintain standards for airspeed, altitude, bank, and the rollout heading.

The ACS takes those same standards and details nine distinct pieces of knowledge, including use of trim, overbanking, and accelerated stalls. There are also seven risk factors, including energy management, dividing attention between the airplane and orientation, and stall/spin awareness.

Two guys in a room. Although the PTS is being swapped for the ACS, the genesis for the standard wasn’t the practical test; the standard was the result of an effort to fix the knowledge test. For years students and instructors have complained of absurd and irrelevant knowledge test questions. Questions on topics such as the number of GPS satellites and how to conduct microwave landing system approaches have made the test more or less a memorization quiz, and not something that properly assesses a pilot’s mastery of knowledge necessary to fly safely.

In response to the complaints, the FAA formed a working group charged with presenting guidelines on how to fix the problem. It quickly became clear a major issue was that the knowledge test had no standard. There was nothing beyond the generic list of aeronautical knowledge topics in Part 61 guiding the two guys in a room who wrote the questions.

As a result of the ACS, the FAA is revising all current knowledge test questions and writing all new questions to align with the standards. Gone are the days when the people who write the questions could look in a handbook or technical order and pull out a random fact. Susan Parson helped spearhead the effort for the FAA. “With a standard it’s easy to see if a question fits, or is proper,” she said.

It also means the questions will become further removed from the knowledge test guides and question banks students currently use to prepare. In return, Parson said, no longer will questions require esoteric calculations that lead to inconsequential results. (An FAA inspector analyzed one of these questions. It took him two hours to answer and the answer choices were only two to three feet apart, meaning there was no real-world knowledge application. He checked the testing statistics and found the average test taker answered in 57 seconds.) Instead, the goal of the ACS is to make testing more relevant, although not necessarily easy.

Cleaning up. There are a number of other benefits the FAA and industry hope to realize by going to the ACS. One is simple organization. As the PTS is currently written, a number of special emphasis areas are listed in the introduction. These are items such as collision avoidance, runway incursion avoidance, and so on. Examiners are supposed to test these, but there’s no guidance on when or how. The ACS puts these special emphasis areas in the right context. Land and hold short operations are in the risk management section for ground operations, for example.

There’s also hope that examiners will be able to better prepare for checkrides, and make the checkride scenarios more realistic. Before every oral and flight test, an examiner is required to make a plan of action that details scenarios under which tasks are tested. With the PTS, each examiner was on his own to make up whatever questions he wished. With the ACS’ focus on risk factors, there are detailed lists on what to consider for each scenario.

Without the ACS being fully deployed, some of what the agency expects to happen is based on guesswork—albeit a somewhat educated guess. The ACS was rolled out to test groups around Orlando and Seattle. Examiners were given basic instruction on how to administer tests using the ACS, and instructors were more or less given only the document. Students were guided by their instructors, as would have been the case under the PTS. After a lengthy period of validating the process, confirming the contents of the ACS, and then testing its impact, many were pleased with the outcome. According to Eric Crump, the head of the aviation program at Polk State College in Florida and the leader of the experimenting process, they wanted to see if people could just pick up the ACS and start using it without extensive training. “What we found was that was exactly the case,” he said.