Part 107 Prep: First Generative AI Teacher for the FAA 107 Drone Exam
Since the Part 107 small Unmanned Aerial System exam became an official test offered by the FAA in August of 2016, over 321,733 people have become official Part 107 pilots through the start of 2024. The amount of Part 107 pilots is continuing to grow as the drone industry itself is growing in market cap with some figures showing it’s currently between a $22-$27 billion industry and by 2031 is estimated to grow to a $91-$166 billion industry. This would be a year over year growth rate of about 20%. The amount of drone pilots is growing year over year at about a rate of 6.47%. So if the market projection is accurate, it’s set to increase faster than the amount of people getting their Part 107 license.
There is a pretty large divide over how folks go about obtaining their Part 107. If you’re like me, you came into it with prior flight experience and likely took the exam for the PPL. It takes little time for most folks with prior flight experience to get up to speed on the part 107. I’ve had mine since January of 2017 and the test itself has changed since most waiver requirements became a thing of the past, different categories were made, and remote id was introduced.
Aside from those with prior flight experience, for many, it’s their first time getting into anything aviation related. I’ve noticed 2 camps of people that are new to aviation. There’s a large group that pays anywhere from $200-$400 for a dedicated online course to prepare for the Part 107 (this is on top of the FAA fee itself which is $175 equaling a total of somewhere between $375-$575). Now on the plus side, some of these courses do offer to refund you both the FAA exam fee and the course fee if you fail (they typically require you to log a certain amount of hours in order for them to pay out). Now on the opposite end of that, there’s the group that spends maybe $15 for a quiz app or nothing at all. The reason they can do this is because all of the Part 107 material needed to pass the exam is provided for free by the FAA. The FAA provides the Airman Certification Standards which essentially gives you a course syllabus of what you need to study as well as all the source documents they provide that are applicable to each section of the syllabus. A large chunk of the test is related to understanding VFR sectionals, the FAA even provides the actual VFR sectional Supplement that you will use for the exam. So you can look at all the VFR figures in the Supplement prior to seeing them on the exam!
So one group is able to get by and pass the exam without spending anything outside of the exam, and another group spends the $200-$400 and likely has similar results. Now some people do have preferences for how they study. Some like it more structured, while others don’t mind tracking down the source material themselves. Either is ok! But the truth of the matter is that on average, the pass rate for the Part 107 exam is at about an 87% as of 2023(the yearly average used to be above the 90% range, but has since slightly decreased). Since it’s inception in August of 2016 to the start of 2024, the aggregate pass rate is 90%. The test score average from 2016 to now sits at about 82% (a 70% is required to pass).
There’s now a new way to study using advances in A.I. We’ve all seen the buzz with ChatGPT, we’ve all seen how incredibly human-like it’s able to at times answer questions; however, we’ve also seen some of the bad with it, namely, hallucinations. We’ve seen how ChatGPT can hallucinate and confidently make up answers. But since it’s release to the public audience in late 2022, there have been significant improvements as new models have been released. One of these improvements is GPTs being able to reference actual source material prior to giving the answer. This is what gave way for a new virtual teacher backed by a GPT to be able to answer any question with incredible accuracy on a site called SymBizzNet: https://www.symbizznet.com/part-107-about/
The virtual teacher uses all of the FAA documents for the Part 107 to guide users which is different than what ChatGPT can do since ChatGPT uses only the internet at large rather than the exact FAA pdfs, which makes ChatGPT susceptible to hallucinations. What SymBizzNet also offers with its Part 107 teacher is highlighted text from FAA source documents and time stamped sources linked to YouTube. This approach is similar to Perplexity, but even Perplexity would be unable to get you time stamped citation videos or highlighted source document text. The other great thing with SymBizzNet is it only costs $15/month with a free week trial. They also have all of the Part 107 FAA source documents accessible in one place. But the tool is only as good as you know how to use it. Since it’s launched, it’s since created a tutorial video covering how it can be used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1NneBtg3Y0
The virtual teacher was used to answer multiple choice questions for a 72 question FAA test bank, it was able to get a 96%. All the answers it got wrong were related to VFR sectionals. That was out of 23 VFR sectional questions. The great thing with SymBizzNet is it has the flexibility to generate it’s own quiz questions based on the Airman Certification Standards (ACS). It can also be used as a guide through each and every ACS topic while giving incredibly accurate answers and source citations to back it up. I think the state of where generative AI is now, it has the ability to perform the same role as an instructor but at a significantly lower cost. A ground instructor only has his knowledge, but cannot quickly and verbatim give you an answer tied to source 24/7. The fact is that even if someone prefers visual/auditory lessons alongside source text, that person is able to get everything they need on YouTube. SymBizznet just helps them get the most up-to-date information, get it much faster, and get exactly what they need without having to watch 20 minutes of irrelevant material just to see the exact information they’re interested in. I think while you can still do it completely free, SymBizzNet offers a lot of convenience of having everything where you need it, having the ability to generate quiz questions that any $15 app can provide, and being able to guide your studies and offer guided material tailored to you.
