in this video I'm going to be sharing the 10 most commonly missed basic navigation questions from the FAA written exam now when we're talking about basic navigation we're talking about things like how to use Zulu Time how to use latitude and longitude to find your position on a map and also how to use the VFR sectional for navigation and surprisingly enough there are quite a few questions that will eat your lunch on these topics on the FAA written exam so let's take a look at those and see what they are so you can master that test now for those of you who haven't been following this series I'm able to get this data by looking at the results from the quizzes in my premium Private Pilot ground course and I can actually see the most missed questions on each topic so what I like to do is to take the 10 most missed questions on each topic and throw them into a quiz of the day and post that quiz here on YouTube so if that sounds cool be sure to keep an eye out for the next Quiz of the day so you can participate when that comes out it's totally free and you don't have to sign up for anything now for this quiz I had 133 people participate and as you can see the average score was 4.62 out of 10 this means that these folks on average scored a 46% on the quiz not good so let's take a look at each one of these questions and see how well you do question one if an airplane departs from an airport in the eastern daylight time zone at 8:15 EDT then flies for 3 hours and lands at an airport in the central daylight time zone what would be the landing time in Zulu in just a minute I'm going to show you the the most common answer for this question but one of my viewers asked if I can start showing you the questions first without the results so you guys can have a chance to solve these before I explain the answers so I'm going to try that in this video let me know if you guys like this better and I'll keep doing it this way if you prefer that okay now that you've had a chance to solve this let's take a look at the most common answers you guys did pretty good on this one but almost half of you missed it so let's take a quick look at why the correct answer is 1515 Zulu it looks like there really isn't a commonly picked wrong answer on this one so I'm thinking that a few of you guys just don't know how to solve it so let's look at how to do that really quick now the question says that we need to look at figure 27 you don't actually need to if you're really familiar with the time zone but there's no reason to take a chance if you're taking the written exam so just pull out the figure it's literally a cheat sheet let's see our takeoff time is 08:15 Eastern Daylight time and then we flew around for 3 hours so our Landing time would be 11:15 Eastern Daylight Time wouldn't it because 8:15 + 3 hours equal 11:15 so all we have to do is to convert to Zulu time and this is super easy all we have to do is look at figure 27 where the FAA basically gives us the answer here remember Zulu time is basically just a slang word for coordinated universal time so all we have to do is look at this chart in the lower leand corner of figure 27 and it literally tells us what to do here to get our Zulu time it looks like for Eastern Daylight Time all we have to do is add 4 hours so 11:15 plus 4 hours is 1515 Zulu so we're landing at 1515 Zulu that's how easy this is guys all right next question how far are you north of the equator if you're at the following coordinates North 51 decimal 8486 West 0 decimal 5545 now I'm going to be honest with you I'm not sure that this one's going to be a question to ask you on the test but I came up with this question because it teaches you the basic premise of latitude and longitude and if you can understand this basic concept you'll be able to use all the other aspects of latitude and longitude so I think it's super important all right let's see if you got the right answer on this one wow I'm really surprised to see that a majority of you guys got this wrong almost 44% of you guys thought the correct answer was 5,184 mil quite a few of you thought it was 51 miles and I can see why you might have thought that since we're at the 51st parallel but that's not quite how this works let me show you how it works really quick before I do I do want to mention that determining lat long can be kind of tricky because you first need to determine what format your coordinates are in but it really doesn't matter for this question you'll get the right answer no matter what format you use this particular format is decimal degrees which means that these numbers right after the main degree coordinates are a percentage of a degree but you could see them like this where the coordinates are in degrees minutes and a percentage of minutes or like this where they're in degrees minutes and seconds I'm not going to explain all these but I'll just show you the basics really quick first things first the most basic thing to know about latitude and longitude is that one minute of latitude equals one nautical mile this is actually why we moved to knots in airplanes over the last 40 years over miles per hour it makes it easier for us to calculate things anyway 1 minute of latitude equals 1 nautical mile and in inside each degree of latitude there are 60 Minutes literally just like a clock so if there are 60 Minutes there are 60 nautical miles in each degree this means that we can simply take this 51° North and multiply it times 60 to get a rough distance from the equator so let's see 51 * 60 = 3,60 nautical miles really we could stop right here and see that 3100 mil is going to be the right answer but let's take this a little further so you can get a clearer picture if these coordinates are 08486 per of one degree of latitude then we could just multiply that times 60 because one degree equal 60 minutes so we're roughly another 51 nautical miles north of this position so we could just add 51 to 3,60 to get a total of 3,111 nautical miles north of the equator now if these coordinates were degrees minutes minutes then these coordinates would actually look like this so you can see that this format actually makes it easier since 1 minute equals 1 nautical mile which means that we could just add this 50.96 mil to our 360 miles to get the same result now you could see seconds which would just show 55 seconds instead of the 0916 and that's just 0916 * 60 because there are 60 seconds in 1 minute not too many people use seconds but there are a few so if you need that that's how you do it now one other thing I want to mention is that this doesn't work quite so well for longitude as it does for latitude because of something called convergence that simply means that the lines of longitude get closer and closer as you get closer to the poles but the premise is basically the same other than that okay next question at what altitude is the top of the lighted obstacle 7 mil from the sa vortac on the 230 radial C figure 23 Area 3 now for this one you do have to use the figure and by the way you can download the faa's testing supplement for free from the faa's website and that has all these figures in it I personally recommend buying the paper version of this from Amazon though it's not very expensive and it makes things a lot easier when you're practicing for the actual test I guess you could just print them off too if you're looking to Save A Buck but either way having paper is much easier for the questions where you have to plot stuff okay let's see how you guys did it looks like 44.5% of you guys got this right and a bunch of you thought it was 1,545 ft MSL but if we zoom in on figure 23 I can see why you guys thought that 1,545 ft is directly under that obstacle but that altitude is actually for this Tower over here sorry guys the FAA is never going to pick easy examples for some reason you just always have to be on your toes because the altitude on this Tower is kind of hidden directly above it and we know that this is the correct altitude because there's nothing else around it over here this 1,545 ft altitude is for the big one in this group down here and that raises an important Point guys it's super important for you to take your time on this test it's important to double check and make sure that you're not missing something because they will try to trick you at every opportunity possible and every wrong question adds up and that can be the difference in passing or failing the test all right fourth question which navigation symbol is indicated by a single dot inside a hexagon with tabs on three of the sides what do you think pause the video if you need and I'll show you what everyone else thought 57% of you guys got this right a vortac is the correct answer now to make things simple this is the symbol it's talking about and these are the tabs the question is describing a VR is only a hexagon and a v DME is a hexagon with a rectangle around it a lot of you guys thought it was a VR DME but that's not the right answer a vortac is a tack in and a VR combin so this symbol is kind of a hybrid between the T symbol which has tabs and the VR but the the DME symbol is just a rectangle so if you throw a rectangle around a hexagon that gives you the V DME symbol okay next question if an airplane departs from an airport in the central daylight time zone at 0730 CDT then flies for 3 hours and 20 minutes and lands at an airport in the eastern daylight time zone what would be the landing time in Zulu once again use figure 27 as necessary this is another one that's pretty simple you guys did a lot better on this one it looks like almost 60 % of you guys got it right but I'll go over it really quick so no one else misses it once again they ask you to find your Landing time in Zulu so I really don't care that I landed in the eastern daylight time zone I'll just start with what I know I know that I took off at 0730 and flew for 3 hours and 20 minutes so that means I landed at 10:50 in the time zone I took off from let's see that was central daylight so all I have to do is pull out my chart on figure 27 and for central daylight I just need to add 5 hours to get over to coordinated universal time or Zulu so I'll add 5 hours to 1050 so our land time in Zulu is550 Zulu too easy okay question six if you are flying into Savannah International Airport and were 16 nautical miles from the field on the 345 radio what would be the easiest way to tell Savannah approach your position when you initially call them up C figure 23 Area 3 now for this one you're going to have to use the figure if indow always look at the figure it never hurts to get more details on what they're asking you before I show you this one let's look at what everyone said some of you guys thought you should tell them that you're on the 345 radial at 16 nautical miles and that's totally fine in most cases but the question actually tells you to give you your position in the easiest possible format to ATC let's look at figure 23 and see how we could do that now if you take your time to plot your position what you'll find is that you're somewhere right here on the map and what's something around here we can use to identify our position yeah this little red flag this is what we call a VFR reporting point and this particular point is the town of Springfield and if you tell ATC that you're over the town of Springfield they're going to know exactly where you are if you told them that you were over the town of gon here or goon however you say that they may or may not know where you are but they are required to know where these VFR reporting points are that's part of their job so use these whenever you can because it makes your radio calls much shorter and cleaner when you use them next we have question seven at what altitude should you fly if you want to clear the group obstacle east of Sulfur Springs airport by 1,000 ft see figure 24 area 5 let's see what you've got and I'll show you the answer okay much better on this one it looks like 60% of you guys got this right but that's still 40% of people missing this one some of you thought that the correct answer was 1,900 119 ft MSL let's take a closer look at figure 24 and see why you thought that ah basic directions got a lot of you guys the question is asking about the group obstacle east of the airport over 20% of you guys were looking over here at this obstacle west of the airport don't answer these questions too quickly guys they will bite you then some of you saw this group obstacle down here southeast of the airport but I guess you missed this one directly east of the airport that has a top of 811 ft MSL and all we have to do is add 1,000 ft to that to get an answer of 1,811 Ft MSL take your time on these questions guys a lot of them aren't that hard you just have to think for a second before you just jump in and answer okay next question number eight according to the VFR sectional in figure 20 area 5 what would be the lowest safe altitude to fly over the blimp hangers near Elizabeth City Coast Guard Air Station pause the video for a second if you need and I'll show the answers here okay looks like most of you guys got this one right some of you thought that we could fly at 1,234 FT MSL so let's take a look at figure 20 and see why we want to fly much higher than that now this is a little bit of a trick question there really isn't anything inherently dangerous about flying over the blimp hangers right here but if you'll notice there's a GPS Waypoint right next to those with a little note down below it it says that there also could be an unmarked balloon on a c C up to 38 ft MSL so be sure to check the nms now if this were me I'd want to give myself a little bit of a safety buffer because I don't know exactly where these are or even how many of them there are 500 ft above those balloons is a good starting point in a situation like this so we can just add 500 to 3,8 ft to get 358 ft MSL too easy once again I think a lot of you guys missed this because you jumped on the most obvious answer too quickly if something seems too easy on the test it probably is just take 10 extra seconds to reread those questions and look at the figures before you answer the question that's the biggest piece of advice I can give anyone taking the FAA written exam all right question number nine use figure 21 Area 3 to determine the approximate coordinates for wasburn airport 5 Charlie 8 all right if you want to try to solve this be sure to pause the video but for everyone else I'm going to dive right into the answers almost 55% of you guys got this right and the rest of the answers are pretty even so I think the people who missed this just didn't know how to solve it so let's take a quick look at how to do that first we had to find wasburn airport which is down here in area three and then I always like to start with latitude so let's see roughly where we are the closest latitude I see is up here at 48° North now you have to use a little bit of common sense to determine that you're in the northern hemisphere but we're in the US so that's pretty obvious if we were south of the Equator that would be 48° South so remember that if you're ever flying down there okay so then we see another big line of latitude down here and the important thing to know is that on a VFR sectional they actually draw you a line at the 30 minute Mark as well as each individual degree of latitude that means that this line right here is not 47° North it's actually 47° 30 minutes north so then we can come down here and count the individual minutes below this Mark let's see 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 minutes so 9 Minutes below 47° and 30 minutes so we can just subtract 9 minutes from 30 to get a latitude of 47° North 21 minutes now let's find the longitude well that's too easy we're literally 1 minute west of the 101 degree marker so we've got 101 West and 1 minutes so you can see that North 47 degrees 21 minutes West 101° and 1 minute is our answer okay here's our 10th most missed question on basic nav when it comes to the FAA written exam and I'm noticing a trend here a lot of you guys are struggling with Zulu time and this isn't something that just goes away after the written exam so I really recommend that you guys focus on this topic a little bit more you'll think yourself later if you do so let's take a quick look at that last question if an airplane departs from an airport in the central daylight time zone at 0900 CDT then flies for 2 hours and lands at an airport in the Mountain Standard Time zone Arizona what would be the local Landing time use figure 27 as necessary okay I'm going to tell you right now that this is a tiny bit of a trick question because Arizona is one of like two states that does not celebrate daylight savings time and that's what it is a celebration because these dingleberries are not joining in on the fund for some reason and that just makes it harder for everyone else but anyway let's take a quick look at this because over half of you guys miss this question and I hate that let's get you straightened out really quick we know that we took off at 0900 central daylight and flew for 2 hours this means that we landed at 1100 central daylight but that's not what the question is asking it's asking us for Mountain Standard Time well there you go they straight up told you that these dingleberries don't celebrate daylight savings time so you could use this chart in figure 27 to convert to Zulu and then over to Mountain standard if you want but you won't always have this fancy chart with you so this is what I like to do start with our land time of 11 Central then we went from Central to mountains so we lost one hour so subtract one but then we fall back because daylight savings ends in the fall so we fall back one hour so we have to subtract one more hour so our land time was 11- one is 10 then minus one more is 9 we're landing at 09 900 in Arizona time what a special State and this is the real reason why most Pilots use Zulu time you don't have to worry about states that are or states that are cut in half by time zones you can just always fly on Zulu time living on Zulu time you're welcome for that by the way now this video wouldn't be possible without the folks that have already purchased and used my premium Private Pilot ground course so I want to thank you guys for doing that I don't know of any other ground course out there that takes the 10 Miss questions and walks you through those and at a fraction of the cost on my D my premium ground course is only 50 bucks so I'm hoping to bust into the market and force all these schools that are ripping you guys off to lower their prices $300 for a ground course is absolutely so please pass the word along that this ground course is here and it has everything you need to prepare you for the written exam thank you guys for watching and I'll see you in the next episode see living on to lwn well you know that I've been through it I'll set my watch back to it Living On Through Time