This morning, the FAA announced details about the recurrent testing and re-certification process for U.S. drone pilots looking to maintain their Remote Pilot Certificate. Huzzah!
Given that the two year window is coming up for those who tested when the FAA first released the Part 107 requirements back in 2016, we’ve been fielding a lot of questions about this recently, and we’re happy to finally start getting some clarification about what the process will look like.
As detailed in the Part 107 regulations, your FAA Remote Pilot Certificate has a 24-month shelf life—which means that drone pilots need to go through a recurrent knowledge testing process every two years to re-up and to maintain their stature as a commercially certificated sUAS operator.
Friendly reminder that our Drone Pilot Ground School students have lifetime access to our training materials for re-certification purposes.
As expected, the process for taking the recurrent knowledge test will be similar to the first time you take the knowledge test, in that you will need to book a testing appointment at one of around 700 FAA-approved knowledge testing centers across the United States.
Also, you’ll need to achieve at least a 70% score to pass the test.
But the breakdown of topics that remote pilots will be tested on is a bit different:
A few items to call out:
- Note the absence of areas III and IV from this list, which correspond to the Weather and Loading & Performance Airmen Certification Standard areas. Pilots won’t be tested on those concepts a second time around. But everything else is up for testing, so make sure to brush up on your regulatory and airspace knowledge. Sectional Charts aren’t disappearing anytime soon, folks.
- The recurrent test will be 40 questions (instead of 60 questions on the initial exam)
- You will be given 1.5 hours to complete your recurrent test (instead of 2 hours during the initial exam)
The FAA also writes:
A person who is to take the recurrent knowledge test must present their remote pilot certificate with an sUAS rating to the airman knowledge testing center’s registration employee, or the airman knowledge testing center’s test proctor.
So make sure to bring your certificate card with you to the test!
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be mapping each of these recurrent knowledge testing areas to specific modules, lessons, and practice questions within our course to make it easy for our existing students to hop back in and to refresh their knowledge.
Have questions? Let us know over at support@dronepilotgroundschool.com.