I'm scheduled for my AT-SAT and then the FAA Academy pipeline. Right now I'm putting in about 3 hours a day on aviation weather, airspace, and the regulations. I've been at it for 6 weeks and scoring around 78% on practice sets, but everything I read says you need 85%+ to feel safe going in.
The spatial reasoning portion is what's messing with my head. I can work through the problems but I'm slow - way slower than I expect I'll need to be under real exam conditions. I've been doing paper exercises and some online tools but I'm not sure if I'm actually improving the right skill or just memorizing patterns.
Also curious about the medical requirements side. I know Class 2 medical is required but I've heard the disqualifying conditions list is pretty specific. Did anyone go through the FAA medical process and find surprises they weren't expecting?
I don't have any prior aviation background - just a strong math foundation from an engineering degree. People keep telling me that helps but I'm not seeing it translate to confidence yet.
The FAA medical surprised me with the vision standards. I had mild color vision deficiency that I didn't know would be tested that specifically. Got flagged and had to do additional testing. Check the full AME worksheet before your appointment.
I studied about 220 hours total over 14 weeks before my AT-SAT. Passed with an 84. The written portion felt very manageable - the real grind is the Academy simulator training after you're accepted.
Math background absolutely helps with the radar separation and mental arithmetic portions. That part of the test will feel almost easy compared to people coming in without that foundation. Lean into it.
The spatial piece does get faster - give it another 3-4 weeks of daily reps. I went from averaging 48 seconds per problem down to 27 seconds over about a month of consistent drills. Speed comes, just trust the process.
I was in a similar spot last year, working full-time with two kids, so I couldn't just grind eight hours on weekends. I ended up doing 45 minutes before work and whatever I had left after the kids went to bed, maybe an hour or two. It took me about four months to consistently hit 85%+ but honestly the quality of what I was studying mattered more than the hours. I found that drilling specific weak spots like atc/questions/airport operations did more for me than just running through full practice sets over and over.
At 78% after six weeks you're not behind, you're actually in decent shape. Don't stress the raw hour count too much. The score plateau is real and it usually breaks once something clicks conceptually, not just from repetition. Keep at it the way you're going and tighten up the areas where you're losing points.
I'm in a similar boat actually. Was stuck around 76% for a few weeks and then something clicked with the airspace stuff and I jumped to 82% almost overnight. Been drilling atc/questions/airport operations questions specifically because that section was killing me, and it's helped a lot. I think the 85% threshold is real though — I wasn't feeling confident until I hit it consistently across multiple sessions, not just once.
I'm planning to sit the AT-SAT in about three weeks. Your 78% at six weeks in sounds honestly pretty solid, especially if you're still climbing. Don't rush it. Another week or two of focused drilling and you'll be there.
Six weeks at 3 hours a day is solid, and honestly 78% at that stage isn't bad. The thing that moved the needle for me wasn't grinding more practice questions — it was going back through every wrong answer and figuring out exactly why it was wrong, not just what the right one was. Like if I missed an airspace question, I'd pull up the actual regulation and read it until I understood the logic behind it. That extra step is slow but it sticks way better than just re-reading the correct answer and moving on.
Airport operations questions were where I kept getting tripped up because I was pattern-matching instead of actually understanding the rules. I spent a whole session just working through atc/questions/airport operations focused only on my wrong answers, and my score on those jumped like 8 points in two weeks. You're closer than you think — the gap from 78 to 85 usually closes faster once you're learning from mistakes instead of just drilling volume.
Six weeks at 3 hours a day is solid, but honestly the 78% tells me you might be doing what I did at first — marking the right answer and moving on. What actually pushed me over 85% was going back through every wrong answer and figuring out exactly why it was wrong, not just why the right one was right. There's a difference, and it matters a lot for the AT-SAT because the distractors are designed to trip up people who half-know the material. I got a lot out of drilling the atc/questions/airport operations 2 set specifically for that reason — the answer explanations are detailed enough that you can see the logic behind the wrong choices.
You're not far off. Keep at it and stop letting yourself off the hook when you guess correctly without knowing why. That's where the real progress is hiding.