Pilot Examiner Failure rate 20% or more

brien23

brien23

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DPE designated pilot examiner failure rate 20 percent or more, what percent of PPL applicants in your area fail on their first try? Their is a FAA expected failure rate, DPE that do not have that are looked at very close.
 
The Chinese are flooding to training schools around me. It is so bad that schools have opened where they don't advertise or even answer the phone in English. Even their school signs are in Chinese. Hearing them on the radio is amazing, no one can understand them. Even the tower is asking for multiple repeats and clarifications.

Due to their English skills orals in my area are going as long as 6-8 hours. From talking with CFIs and a few DPEs the main cause of this stat is the high influx of Chinese currently training in the area.
 
Jamie Kirk said:
The Chinese are flooding to training schools around me. It is so bad that schools have opened where they don't advertise or even answer the phone in English. Even their school signs are in Chinese. Hearing them on the radio is amazing, no one can understand them. Even the tower is asking for multiple repeats and clarifications.

Due to their English skills orals in my area are going as long as 6-8 hours. From talking with CFIs and a few DPEs the main cause of this stat is the high influx of Chinese currently training in the area.
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You live in AZ? Aeroguard here is all Chinese. Westwind all South Koreans. The Koreans are actually not too bad though.
 
CC268 said:
You live in AZ? Aeroguard here is all Chinese. Westwind all South Koreans. The Koreans are actually not too bad though.
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Southern California. They have 4 days a week they spend all day in our local practice area and the CFIs will not go there on those days anymore. They fly to one further. They will call out their position and location but that's it, they don't look or avoid anyone. Have had to stop a steep turn or S turn too many times because they failed to look for traffic and they are same altitude and very close. My CFI has scorned them over the radio a few times and they don't even respond or change their ways. 10 minutes later there goes the blue Cesna right in front of us as we dive down.
 
Kritchlow said:
Don’t forget the period at the end of your sentence.
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And I should have started the sentence with “The”. But I’ll bet most people understand mine in one reading. I’m still not sure what the OP is saying.
 
Jamie Kirk said:
Southern California. They have 4 days a week they spend all day in our local practice area and the CFIs will not go there on those days anymore. They fly to one further. They will call out their position and location but that's it, they don't look or avoid anyone. Have had to stop a steep turn or S turn too many times because they failed to look for traffic and they are same altitude and very close. My CFI has scorned them over the radio a few times and they don't even respond or change their ways. 10 minutes later there goes the blue Cesna right in front of us as we dive down.
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My instructor taught over at the “Chinese” school here for a while. He had some interesting things to say.
 
Not sure how any of us would know what percent of applicants fail on their first try. That information isn’t readily available to the public.
 
Jamie Kirk said:
The Chinese are flooding to training schools around me. It is so bad that schools have opened where they don't advertise or even answer the phone in English. Even their school signs are in Chinese. Hearing them on the radio is amazing, no one can understand them. Even the tower is asking for multiple repeats and clarifications.

Due to their English skills orals in my area are going as long as 6-8 hours. From talking with CFIs and a few DPEs the main cause of this stat is the high influx of Chinese currently training in the area.
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Actually, since proficiency in English is a requirement, I'd fail them in the first ten minutes. (Except I'm not a DPE, nor do I give flight lessons, even for cash.)
 
Jamie Kirk said:
Due to their English skills orals in my area are going as long as 6-8 hours. From talking with CFIs and a few DPEs the main cause of this stat is the high influx of Chinese currently training in the area.
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Something about read, speak, and understand the English language trips something in my memory. The oral should be over in about 5 minutes.
 
You guys going to have a problem if that English proficiency is waved/relaxed in aviation? Am in the medical field and 75% of my interactions are in Spanish. I stopped fretting about it decades ago. I hear Spanish quite often on CTAF at the home drome.
 
Absolutely they will. They're training their replacements too if they ever relax cabotage. Everybody talks about automation as being the inflection point, but I don't particularly take for granted this notion that they'll never touch the Jones act. If and when they do, american pilots would have wished they hadnt approached flight training Asian foreigners with such naivete.

The fact is we give away our faa certificates for cheap, and that gesture is not reciprocated by our neighbors, not in the least. That makes US pilots the patsies of the whole thing, especially if cabotage laws break down.
 
danhagan said:
You guys going to have a problem if that English proficiency is waved/relaxed in aviation? Am in the medical field and 75% of my interactions are in Spanish. I stopped fretting about it decades ago. I hear Spanish quite often on CTAF at the home drome.
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I guess as long as controllers speak a minimum of 6 or 8 languages, it should be OK in airspace that requires ATC interaction. Maybe they can require the rest of us to be multilingual at uncontrolled airspace in order to make it easier for those who aren't.
 
danhagan said:
You guys going to have a problem if that English proficiency is waved/relaxed in aviation? Am in the medical field and 75% of my interactions are in Spanish. I stopped fretting about it decades ago. I hear Spanish quite often on CTAF at the home drome.
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Drug runners from Mexico maybe?
 
hindsight2020 said:
The fact is we give away our faa certificates for cheap, and that gesture is not reciprocated by our neighbors, not in the least. That makes US pilots the patsies of the whole thing, especially if cabotage laws break down.
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This is what I was thinking. In a decade or so, China will buy a bunch of LSA trainers and try training on their own over there, eventually outpacing the training here ...
 
There is a threshold, which is neither an "expected fail rate" nor 20%. It is in fact 90% pass; beyond which (meaning better than 90% pass) a Designee may be subject to "additional inspection or surveillance" by his/her POI.

A Designated Pilot Examiner should determine a lack of English proficiency prior to initiating the Practical Test. It is possible to be given a Notice of Disapproval related to this reason if the failure is linked to an ACS or PTS task, but it is most often associated with a Letter of Discontinuance and referred to the local FSDO for further review.

The "pass/fail" rates of DPEs are not publicly available.
 
Jamie Kirk said:
The Chinese are flooding to training schools around me. It is so bad that schools have opened where they don't advertise or even answer the phone in English. Even their school signs are in Chinese. Hearing them on the radio is amazing, no one can understand them. Even the tower is asking for multiple repeats and clarifications.

Due to their English skills orals in my area are going as long as 6-8 hours. From talking with CFIs and a few DPEs the main cause of this stat is the high influx of Chinese currently training in the area.
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That's why I'm trying to get my local DPE is come to my home field. She's based at an airport with a foreigner infested pilot school and the pattern there is hell.
 
so is that rate based on all certificates Or just the private??
 
benyflyguy said:
so is that rate based on all certificates Or just the private??
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From the Avweb article...
What I found was that pass rates have declined on the national level. If we look at all types of practical tests, the pass rate in 2007 for 43,619 practical tests was 80.1%. In 2017, for 38,210 tests the pass rate was 76.5%. This is an overall drop in passing rate of 3.6%.

Looking more specifically at private and commercial initial pilot certification tests, passing rates are down nearly 5% in both cases from a decade ago. Much of that drop has come in the last two years.
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The pass rate at the 141 school where I work and a neighboring airports 141 school is >95%. Those that fail usually have a case of testitus.
 
hindsight2020 said:
Absolutely they will. They're training their replacements too if they ever relax cabotage. Everybody talks about automation as being the inflection point, but I don't particularly take for granted this notion that they'll never touch the Jones act. If and when they do, american pilots would have wished they hadnt approached flight training Asian foreigners with such naivete.

The fact is we give away our faa certificates for cheap, and that gesture is not reciprocated by our neighbors, not in the least. That makes US pilots the patsies of the whole thing, especially if cabotage laws break down.
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Everyone needs to understand what cabotage does to an industry. Case in point, the US Merchant Marines. The Jones Act, too.

The theory applies to US airlines. But this topic is totally for another thread.

Good post 2020. Cabotage is my nightmare.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G891A using Tapatalk
 
Half Fast said:
Does the drop in pass rate correlate with the change from PTS to ACS?
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The pass rate correlates directly to the quality of the instructors and a very low initial CFI failure rate. A new CFI is has very low experiace and low quality thanks to the FAA farming out the tests to DPEs.

This includes graduate from the big name schools were a new CFI graduates after dropping $50-$80k and doesn’t even have an HP endorsement in their logbook.
 
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Jamie Kirk said:
The Chinese are flooding to training schools around me. It is so bad that schools have opened where they don't advertise or even answer the phone in English. Even their school signs are in Chinese. Hearing them on the radio is amazing, no one can understand them. Even the tower is asking for multiple repeats and clarifications.

Due to their English skills orals in my area are going as long as 6-8 hours. From talking with CFIs and a few DPEs the main cause of this stat is the high influx of Chinese currently training in the area.
Click to expand...

I feel bad for 6PC. I flew with him a few years ago out of DTO and it was bad. Really bad. The tower was literally yelling at all of them for being stupid.
 
danhagan said:
You guys going to have a problem if that English proficiency is waved/relaxed in aviation? Am in the medical field and 75% of my interactions are in Spanish. I stopped fretting about it decades ago. I hear Spanish quite often on CTAF at the home drome.
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There are obvious reasons why language is internationally standardized in aviation. You can't give someone a certificate that allows them to fly all over the place, at night, in class B airspace, foreign countries etc... if the controllers and pilots don't all have basic understanding of a common language.
 
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Clip4 said:
The pass rate correlates directly to the quality of the instructors and a very low initial CFI failure rate. A new CFI is has very low experiace and low quality thanks to the FAA farming out the tests to DPEs.
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So why did it take 30 years of DPEs doing initial CFI rides before seeing the increased failure rate in all other checkrides?

And how is their experience lower when the flight experience requirements haven’t changed appreciably for over 40 years?
 
MauleSkinner said:
So why did it take 30 years of DPEs doing initial CFI rides before seeing the increased failure rate in all other checkrides?

And how is their experience lower when the flight experience requirements haven’t changed appreciably for over 40 years?
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Because all the CFI rides were not farmed out and the rides at FSDOs were n9tably more difficult. So a CFI applicant had to be better prepared. I have only heard on 1 CFI failure over the last decade on my area.

Also while the experiance hasn’t changed, the number of puppy mills has increased dramatically.
 
MauleSkinner said: ↑
So why did it take 30 years of DPEs doing initial CFI rides before seeing the increased failure rate in all other checkrides?

And how is their experience lower when the flight experience requirements haven’t changed appreciably for over 40 years?

:no:
Clip4 said:
Because all the CFI rides were not farmed out and the rides at FSDOs were n9tably more difficult. So a CFI applicant had to be better prepared. I have only heard on 1 CFI failure over the last decade on my area.

Also while the experiance hasn’t changed, the number of puppy mills has increased dramatically.
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:eek2: BS... I took my CFI ride 35+ years ago with a DPE. Most of the DPEs I knew back then were authorized to do CFI rides. The Feds were not doing Initial CFI rides then. I want to say it was in the mid to late 90's that the FAA required all Initial CFi rides to be done with a FAA inspector. Renewals and reinstatements were done with DPEs.

Noah W
 
dell30rb said:
There are obvious reasons why language is internationally standardized in aviation. You can't give someone a certificate that allows them to fly all over the place, at night, in class B airspace, foreign countries etc... if the controllers and pilots don't all have basic understanding of a common language.
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I'm hearing a LOT of spanish on CTAF in my area. We're RP for runway 28 ... had a Spanish speaker on a left down wind while I was on the right down wind. If I didn't understand his call out, I'd have never known we were going to be head on at our base turn. There was ZERO english in his transmission or my response after he failed to respond to the first english inquiry.
 
danhagan said:
I'm hearing a LOT of spanish on CTAF in my area. We're RP for runway 28 ... had a Spanish speaker on a left down wind while I was on the right down wind. If I didn't understand his call out, I'd have never known we were going to be head on at our base turn. There was ZERO english in his transmission or my response after he failed to respond to the first english inquiry.
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Not sure what point you’re trying to drive home here? There is no obligation to make any radio call in that situation. If it were me (I am not fluent in Spanish) I’d just shut the radio off and carry on.
 
Clip4 said:
Because all the CFI rides were not farmed out and the rides at FSDOs were n9tably more difficult. So a CFI applicant had to be better prepared. I have only heard on 1 CFI failure over the last decade on my area.

Also while the experiance hasn’t changed, the number of puppy mills has increased dramatically.
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look at pass rates. cfi initial pass rates with dpes actually fail more than with the fsdo. Fsdo isnt even harder at least anecdotally. We have a few cfis with sub 3 hr checkrides flight included.
 
Clip4 said:
Because all the CFI rides were not farmed out and the rides at FSDOs were n9tably more difficult. So a CFI applicant had to be better prepared. I have only heard on 1 CFI failure over the last decade on my area.

Also while the experiance hasn’t changed, the number of puppy mills has increased dramatically.
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From what I’ve heard, the DPE initial CFI checkrides are generally more difficult than the FAA ones...the biggest factor with FAA checkrides seems to be fear of “the FAA”.

I'd offer that the reason initial CFI failures may be down is more about the fact that the top reasons for failure are much more available, which means training the test is easier. IMO, training the test is one of the biggest deterrents to quality pilots/instructors.
 
mondtster said:
Not sure what point you’re trying to drive home here? There is no obligation to make any radio call in that situation. If it were me (I am not fluent in Spanish) I’d just shut the radio off and carry on.
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Not driving home any point ... topic was foreigners and radio comm difficulty in certain areas of the U.S. I'd recommend leaving the radio on for other traffic calls rather than turning it off as you suggested though.
 
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