0.1 Welcome & How to Use This Course

8 min ·

You are here because you want to fly a drone for work. Maybe you are a photographer whose clients keep asking for aerials. Maybe you inspect roofs and you are tired of ladders. Maybe you farm, or sell houses, or shoot weddings, or run a construction site and want your own progress photos. Whatever brought you, the requirement is the same: to fly a drone for any purpose that is not strictly recreational, you need a Remote Pilot Certificate with a small UAS rating, and to get one you pass a 60-question multiple-choice test called the Unmanned Aircraft General - Small, or UAG.

Here is the first thing to understand, and it matters more than any fact in this course: this test is passable, and thousands of people with no aviation background pass it every month. You do not need to have flown an airplane. You do not need to know what a VOR is yet. You need to learn a defined body of material, most of which is memorization, some of which is chart reading, and none of which is beyond an adult who can concentrate for an hour at a time.

The people who fail are almost never the people who could not understand it. They are the people who skimmed, who never practiced on an actual sectional chart, or who studied the parts that felt interesting instead of the parts the FAA actually weights. This course is built to stop all three of those things from happening to you.

Pick a study plan and pick a date

Nothing predicts passing like having a test date on the calendar. Pick one of the three plans below, count forward, and schedule the exam now. You can reschedule if you need to. What you cannot do is study indefinitely toward a date that does not exist.

The 2-week sprint front-loads regulations and airspace, gives three solid days to chart reading, and spends the last three days entirely on practice exams. It works, but it is demanding and it assumes you will not miss a day.

The 4-week standard is the default recommendation. One module per week, with the weekend used for the module exam and for re-drilling anything you missed. Airspace and chart reading get the most room because that is where most people lose points.

The 8-week relaxed plan spends thirty minutes a day and leans hard on the flashcard deck. If you are the kind of person who learns by repeated short exposure rather than long sessions, this is your plan, and you will probably score higher than the sprinters.

How the course is organized

The FAA publishes a document called the Airman Certification Standards - FAA-S-ACS-10B - that lists every subject the test may cover, broken into five areas, each with a published percentage of the exam. This course is built directly on that document. Every lesson lists the specific knowledge codes it covers, and the dashboard shows you a live map of which codes you have mastered and which you have not touched.

1. Module 0 - Start Here. What you are reading. Orientation, the exam, and your plan.
2. Module 1 - Regulations. What Part 107 requires of you, your aircraft, and your crew.
3. Module 2 - Airspace & Chart Reading. The largest single source of missed questions, and the biggest module after Operations.
4. Module 3 - Weather. Reading a METAR, understanding stability, and knowing when not to fly.
5. Module 4 - Loading & Performance. How drones fly, weight and balance, and the handful of calculations you will be asked to do.
6. Module 5 - Operations. The biggest area on the test at 35 to 45 percent. Radio, airports, emergencies, decision-making, physiology, and maintenance.
7. Module 6 - Exam Preparation. Registration, test day, the cram sheet, a final chart drill, and what happens after you pass.

Every lesson has the same shape. It opens with objectives and the ACS codes it covers. The body mixes prose with Know this cold boxes for pure memorization, Common trap boxes that name the specific wrong answer people pick, worked examples, and figures. Two or more knowledge checks are scattered through the text rather than piled at the end, because answering a question thirty seconds after reading something is what makes it stick. Each lesson closes with a short summary you can reread the night before the exam.

How the app works for you

• Per-lesson quizzes with an explanation on every option, not only the correct one.
• Module exams that pull from the whole module.
• Full-length mock exams: 60 questions, 120 minutes, no feedback until you submit, then a breakdown of exactly which ACS areas cost you points.
• The weak-area engine. Every question you miss is tagged by knowledge code. The dashboard builds you a custom drill from the codes you are weakest in, so your study time goes where it earns the most.
• Flashcards with spaced repetition for the pure-memorization numbers - altitudes, distances, times, and thresholds.
• Bookmarks, notes, and full-text search across every lesson, plus a printable view if you prefer paper.

One last thing before you start. You will hit a lesson - probably in airspace, possibly in weather - where you feel like you are reading a foreign language. That is normal, it happens to nearly everyone, and it is not a signal that you cannot do this. Slow down, look at the figure, and come back to the lesson the next day. It reads differently the second time. Every certificated remote pilot went through the same wall.