Less than 2% clear air navigation exam

Mumbai: One may surmise that the poor exam results are because of the very high standards of the DGCA for conducting Commercial Pilot License (CPL) exams. But that is not entirely true, if ground instructors and aspirants are to be believed.
Like other CPL subjects, Air Navigation is an objective paper of 100 marks with 70 as the minimum required to clear it. The DGCA holds CPL exams once every three months and April’s Air Navigation paper (general) had 90 questions, out of which about 50 were numericals. But that is not where the problem lies.
“This time around, questions of about 20 marks were from the syllabus. Some questions had inadequate information and so the numericals could not be solved. Others did not carry appropriate answers in the options given with the question,’’ says a ground training instructor. “About 1.5% students who appeared for the exam have cleared it. Doesn’t that say something about the exam process,’’ he adds.
“For Air Navigation, you study 10-15 books on various radio aids, gyro instruments, solve a number of numericals, only to find out there are hardly any questions on these. The distribution of marks is arbitrary. Suddenly there will be several questions on one topic,’’ Mohan Ramesh (name changed), one of the 15 students who passed. said.
DGCA Nasim Zaidi said that the question bank was expanded this time. “About 30-40 new questions were added. These were from the given syllabus. We have not revised it,’’ Zaidi said. However, students protest that the DGCA syllabus is not well-defined and many books recommended for reading by it are not available in India.
10/06/10 Manju V/Times of India