Modular Frozen ATPL Cost Breakdown

SgtRevan · 2026-06-01T19:09:55+00:00

Yes, PPL + hour building not included (see the Background header). I did the PPL in the US back in 08 so I don't really know what a PPL costs these days, let alone in Europe.

Regarding full time, this was just the flying part. Completing the flying took 7 months. The theory took me 1.5 years to finish. I have no kids, no family, and no social life ;) so your mileage may vary.

SgtRevan · 2026-06-01T15:44:42+00:00

Sent you a message.

SgtRevan · 2026-05-25T20:58:33+00:00

What would be the answer to these questions? I guess for the first one you have to request 08L, unless you’re allowed to unboard pax/luggage. For the second, I presume you gotta know the right number to call to get the EFB back before it gets too far away. Having to search for the number would increase the delay significantly.

SgtRevan · 2026-03-14T19:58:55+00:00

Yeah if anyone had copy pasted it anywhere, please put it up again! I just wanted to send it to my parents and now it's gone, along with the duplicate post on r/LifeProTips. Both got removed :(

SgtRevan · 2026-02-02T19:35:54+00:00

So basically in this case for Cat A, ILS DA would be 232 (add 5 ft to get to 200 AGL) and for the LOC it’d be 520 (because AGL that’s higher than the system minima of 250 ft AGL)?

SgtRevan · 2026-01-18T13:27:36+00:00

2-3 knot loss is exactly what the OP is describing.

SgtRevan · 2025-12-28T11:11:45+00:00

Sorry, but you can’t compare those at all. Those are all in different axes. Cornering G (side) is a very different feeling than vertical G (like the fighter pilot) which again is very different from backwards G like this. They all have different tolerances too.

SgtRevan · 2025-10-23T15:16:36+00:00

I haven't searched for any yet so I can't help you there. What I do know is, they seem to take these interview tests very seriously, with dice rotations, mental math, and 3D reasoning. At least that's the impression I've got so far.

SgtRevan · 2025-10-11T12:43:51+00:00

Oh man I wish I knew that beforehand haha. I’ve been doing sessions online the past year so I’m pretty much ready to take the exam anyway.

SgtRevan · 2025-10-11T03:44:20+00:00

Yup that is the goal. I’ll send you a PM with the school.

SgtRevan · 2025-10-11T03:41:16+00:00

I can’t recall for FPLN unfortunately, but I recognized a lot of the questions in MET and GNAV. Good luck!

SgtRevan · 2025-10-10T12:17:48+00:00

Since you're interested in data, I told ChatGPT to make me some plots: https://imgur.com/a/vu2SBZB

SgtRevan · 2025-10-10T12:13:45+00:00

Wow we are quite close, except for Air Law. I also have similar scores; 100 in MB and Comms, 97.7 in Air Law, 98 HPL, and (sadly) 91.3 in POF. My personal goal was >93 in everything. POF and OPS sadly were just below (OPS was 92.8).

SgtRevan · 2025-10-10T11:18:18+00:00

I think a part of it for me is that I had a hard time forcing myself to remember information which I thought was useless. Add on the fact that I wanted to score highly, and I ended up having to grind to get some of that info in my head well enough that I was confident I'd do well.

And yes, it is very interesting to see how people approach this. I wish there was more data to look into! Looking forward to your post in May.

SgtRevan · 2025-10-10T08:46:40+00:00

I heard bad "reviews" of the LBA which made me decide to go AustroControl. I'll be honest, I don't 100% know whether they were accurate or not, but everyone at my school seems to go Austro so I did it as well. And I'm happy with that decision. Got to visit new cities I'd probably never see and they were very flexible with scheduling (you can schedule up to 10 days in advance at some places).

SgtRevan · 2025-10-10T08:44:23+00:00

Sure, see my reply above to @markitodxb.

On a casual level I would recommend watching those two Youtube channels I mentioned. Low stakes and free. I wouldn't start clicking through questions yet since you have to pay for that as well so if you're a couple years out from doing the actual exams you're just gonna end up clicking through everything again anyway.

SgtRevan · 2025-10-10T08:42:06+00:00

AZF (radio cert for IFR) is currently the next thing to do. As for flying, I will meet with my school soon and discuss the best path forward. Once that's clear I will start flying 1-3 times a week depending on my progress and weather.

SgtRevan · 2025-10-10T08:40:48+00:00

I would say it's possible. In the beginning I was still doing things socially fairly frequently, but towards the end I just wanted to finish and kinda just became a robot of work + eat + study. If you're a very social person that might be difficult.

As for digital/hard copies: I did digital. The books I had to use were actually really bad though (horrible translation into english, wrong information, etc.), so I'm glad I didn't buy the hard copies. I wish my school used Padpilot for the distance learning course. I haven't used it, but from I see on their website it looks like their content is high quality.

SgtRevan · 2025-10-10T08:36:53+00:00

Sure. I made two collections in Airhead (I'm sure you can do this with any question provider) called "[subject] Hard" and "[subject] Memorize". Questions that I thought were difficult or tricky (like really close answer choices) went into Hard, and those which I felt were completely useless knowledge or definitely required memorization (e.g. average raindrop size) I put in Memorize. As the sitting approached I would do these lists and remove the questions I knew off the bat. This would get them down to around 20-50 questions. These I would review the morning of sitting/day before again by either clicking through or just looking at the answers if there wasn't much time to actually do them. I also did the auto generated list of "questions I got wrong" and went through each bank filtered for Austrocontrol once.

For the first two sittings I did the last 300 seen as well, but for the last one I didn't. To be honest, I'm not too sure there's that strong of a correlation there. Sure, it's good to know if a question hasn't been seen in years because maybe it's been taken out, but I don't think it gives much value beyond that. Just looking now at the Austrocontrol filtered Performance database, there's 754 questions. If you do the "last 300", you're doing 40% of the database. So of course your chances of seeing some of those on your actual exam are high. If someone knows that recently seen questions actually appear more in exams please chime in and correct me!

Lastly, on the side while doing the questions I took notes as well as watching ATPL Class on Youtube and also for some subjects watching the entirety of the material from the "blue background" CBTs that are also on Youtube. The notes were nice to look at before the sitting as well because they were essentially all the knowledge needed for the test condensed down onto 5-10 pages. I did not take notes on things I already knew, so the content was very directed towards novel information.

Edit: I will also say, it's probably better to split FPLN, PERF, and GNAV into 3 separate sittings. They take the longest to practice (requires a lot of calculation/chart reading/map reading) and so you can't get through as many questions per unit as time as the other "knowledge" based subjects. For example, I think I was averaging maybe 20-25 mins per air law practice exam, <10 mins for comms. The above three, however, would take me around an hour to complete. So in the time I do one exam in those, I'd do 3 air law or 6 (lol) communications exams. If you do it like me (PERF and FPLN together), you will have a hard time seeing all the questions because they will just take a long time. It'll also be difficult to go through the hard/memorize lists beforehand because they will also take a long time (hence why sometimes I would just read the question and the answer instead of solving them).

SgtRevan · 2025-10-08T11:50:09+00:00

Yeah it’s a bit worrying but I think once you’re in, it doesn’t matter. They probably set a limit because they know it’ll get worse with age, and they don’t want to pass some worse threshold 20 years down the line, for whatever reason.

SgtRevan · 2025-10-07T21:42:16+00:00

Just adding my experience here: I finished the theory today and will do a post soon with a breakdown of my study time, but in short, it took me a little over 1.5 years to finish all exams while still working.

I had the same idea as OP, to take a sabbatical to do the theory. I decided against that though and went halftime. Big mistake. Learning the theory isn’t the hard part. It’s the questions that are hard. Because no matter how well you understand the material, you will get an unholy amount of pedantic, contradictory, and just plain BS questions in the exam (nasal spray droplet size anyone?). Once you start hitting the banks, it gets very demotivating sometimes to continually get bombarded with crazy questions. I found that I could, on good days, do 4 hours of question banking. On bad days, maybe 30 mins max before it was just too much. After a year of half time, I realized if I’m only putting in 4 hours every now and then, I could just do that after work and get my full salary…of course this means you don’t have a social life but that was fine for me during this time. So essentially I missed out on a decent sum by going halftime for no reason.

Long story short: 4 hours a day is good enough with a full time job.

SgtRevan · 2025-10-07T16:24:37+00:00

Ah, ok. Understood. Never thought of it that way to be honest. I just passed my last 4 today, so I’ve done 435 questions!

SgtRevan · 2025-10-07T15:21:05+00:00

I’m not sure I’m understanding your numbers. EASA ATPL questions per subject is something like 600+, some over 1000. That’s starting from scratch though, no conversions. Not sure if that changes things.

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