ATPL Communications

Communications is the best return in the whole ATPL. It is also the subject candidates most often fail twice. 34 questions. 60 minutes. 75% to pass. Subject 090 asks 79 objectives for 34 marks — 2.3 objectives per mark, better than anything else in the series. A subject this small should be a formality. It is not, because it looks like something you already know. Being understood is not the standard being tested. The examination asks what the prescribed word is, in what prescribed order, with what prescribed pronunciation. A pilot who has spent two hundred hours saying something slightly wrong, and never been corrected, will answer from habit and lose the mark. ATPL Communications is a complete revision guide and question bank for the EASA and UK CAA airline transport pilot licence theory examination, written by an airline captain and Chief Flight Instructor, and built on all 79 objectives for Subject 090. It gives the exact words. Where the answer is a form of words — the standard phrases, the definitions, the message elements — this book gives that form of words and says so, rather than paraphrasing it into something that examines worse. It teaches the rules now in force. SERA has been amended several times since the 2020 objectives were published. The communication failure procedure now provides a second transponder code, 7601, for an IFR flight that meets VMC and continues in VMC. Older ground-school texts give 7600 for both cases. This book teaches the current rule and says exactly where the older teaching differs. It tells you where the marks are. One page, before anything else. Distress and urgency feels like the most important chapter in the book and is worth three marks; call signs, read-back and phraseology are worth seventeen. A plan built on what feels important spends its time in the wrong place. What is in it Eight chapters: definitions, station suffixes, Q-codes and message priority; the phonetic alphabet, numbers, time, technique and the standard words; call signs, transfer of communication, read-back, radar phraseology, vertical position and CPDLC; phraseology through a VFR and an IFR flight, with SELCAL, ACARS and ACAS calls; METAR, ATIS, VOLMET and air reports; communication failure, light signals and blocked frequencies; distress and urgency, the emergency codes and the imposition of silence; and the radio spectrum, VHF propagation, 8.33 kHz channels and Morse identifiers. Every chapter carries the confusable pairs the examiner likes to swap, the traps and why they work, one flight that puts the rules in order on the flight deck, a table of the numbers you must own, and its own questions with worked explanations. 126 questions through the chapters, and a 34-question paper at the back weighted exactly as the examination is — and no question in it appears anywhere else. Thirteen diagrams drawn for this book. Written for the paper you are actually sitting. The main text follows SERA and the ICAO procedure, and boxes marked UK give the UK position where CAP 413 differs — the nine-element emergency message, the pilot qualification element, the STUDENT prefix. For integrated and modular students, frozen ATPL candidates, and anyone preparing for the practical R/T test. A revision guide, not a course of training: enrolment with an Approved Training Organisation remains a legal prerequisite. It contains no questions from any question bank — every question was written for this book. This is not a radiotelephony licence course; the practical R/T test is a separate qualification.