PilotPrep blog
Flight training, aviation news, and events
Notes on checkride prep, what’s happening in aviation, and where pilots and students are meeting up.
The Airspace Questions DPEs Love to Ask (and the Follow-Ups That Bust Applicants)
How to Know You're Actually Ready for Your Checkride Oral
FAA Opens a Channel for Reporting Bad AWOS Data: What It Means in Practice
A new public webform lets pilots flag outages and erroneous readings from automated weather systems, and that changes the preflight weather conversation.
Record Controller Hiring: What It Means for Training Airspace
The FAA brought on 2,235 controller trainees in FY2026, and the staffing math could eventually matter more to student pilots than it seems.
The Question You Answer Twice: Why Examiners Circle Back
Applicants treat a repeated question as a signal they got it wrong the first time, and that assumption causes more damage than the original answer did.
Flight Data Recordeds in the Training Fleet: What One School's Retrofit Signals
A European flight school is putting flight data recorders in 35 training aircraft, and the reasons behind it matter more than the hardware.
The eFlyer 2 Just Flew. Here's What That Does (and Doesn't) Mean for Training Fleets
Bye Aerospace's electric trainer completed its first flight this month — a real milestone, but not a fleet decision yet.
The Ladder Nobody Explains: What Actually Changes Between PPL, IFR, and CPL
Each certificate and rating changes what you're allowed to do, but the more useful question is what it changes about how you think.
Why "Where Did You Get That Weather" Trips Up So Many Applicants
Examiners rarely ask if you can read a METAR — they ask if you know why that data exists and where its limits are.