Customer Reviews

Commercial Oral Exam Guide: The Comprehensive Guide to Prepare You for the FAA Oral Exam (Oral Exam Guide series)

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Mr Hayes' guide is a fair and generic review for oral portion of the commercial (single-engine, airplane) checkride and covers required equipment (91.213, MELs), restrictions on flying for hire (part 91 vs 121), and general info on complex airplanes. The Gleim book has a more thorough coverage on regulations and maneuvers.

Any guide like this should be a supplement to a review with your CFI. Most examiners have particular areas they wish to emphasize -- usually based on previous applicants or trends from the FAA/NTSB inspectors.

Where this book is deficient, and this is largely because the nature of the commercial rating, is its description of advanced systems. This is because for the commercial, you take part or all of your checkride using a complex (retractible gear, cowl flaps, controllable pitck prop), airplane. The seriousness of the rating requires that you know a *lot* about the aircraft. Successful applicants will bond with the pilot operating handbook, as well as "memorize" the placement of every gage, knob and instrument.

For the purposes of review, Mr Hayes assumes you have a Cessna 172RG, which is not a bad guess as it's among the cheaper and more ubiquitous training retractible airplanes available. He does a good job covering the basics of the 172rg differences (hydraulic landing gear, cowl flaps and prop). To his credit, he makes an attempt at including suggested power settings for the maneuvers. (Unfortunately, these will only be approximations, you have to try them in the plane you're going to do the exam in.)

I just finished the flight and oral aspects of the commercial exam. Looking back on it, this book did LITTLE to help. I referenced it a few times, but for the most part, it wasn't very helpful at all(It was very wordy and confusing and it doesnt give you the "why").
I would only buy this book if you can get it for cheap. Otherwise, use the FAR/AIM, airplane flying handbook, and the Jeppeson Commercial/instrument book. The Jeppeson book was by far the most valuable and informational.