Sporty's Pilot Training 4+

Amazing training! Do not buy from app store.

I bought this to supplement a cheaper PPL ground school that I went thru before I knew anything about aviation. I wish I would have started with Sporty’s. The training is so well done and easy to understand. However I would recommend going directly to their website to buy the courses instead of using the Apple in app purchase. I ran into an issue where progress would not sync to their server and ended up losing many hours of work because I didn’t have a sporty’s account logged in at the time of the in app purchase. It was frustrating and customer service had to help resolve. I don’t think it would have happened if I had just bought it directly from their web portal. They really need to fix their app to handle this situation its a big hole in the system and I’m sure I’m not the only one who fell in it.

Video downloading is an exercise in frustration, hosed my iCloud backups

For whatever reason the developers of this app store any videos downloaded for offline use in the app’s “documents” directory, meaning that they’ll be automatically be backed up to iCloud as part of iOS’s iCloud backup feature. This is not only a waste of iCloud storage space (I can download the videos again via the app if necessary), but in my case it prevented iOS from backing up altogether as uploading 6GB of instrument training videos over my slow DSL connection would take an eternity. I’m very lucky that nothing happened to my iPad in the weeks between downloading the videos and iOS notifying me of the lack of completed backups, as it very likely would have resulted in losing important data.

Additionally, the offline download functionality is poorly implemented. Want to download all videos in a given section? The app will begin downloading all videos at once, leading to it taking an eternity for even a single video to complete. What’s more, if you switch away from the app for more than a moment or two, the video downloads are interrupted and you’ll need to manually start them again. And start again they will. Even if the video was 90% downloaded, an interrupted download will start over from scratch. This means that on all but the fastest connections you’re forced to sit and keep your device awake to let the download complete, lest you be forced to start the download over again.

Ответ разработчика ,

Thanks for your feedback. We have now changed the offline storage behavior so saved videos are no longer included with the iCloud backup. We also plan to implement a more robust download manager in a future release.

Best you can get

By far the best study app you can use. I studied with it for two months straight and was able to pass my private pilot written exam with a 90%. Practice questions are in a similar layout with some questions very similar to the exam. If you pass the practice exam on here with over an 80% you’re guaranteed to pass the exam. The studying resources the app off is second to none. I will have to say…I do wish the app video segment would go in order instead of jumping around, circling back around in later segments. Example weather will be discussed in multiple chapters making it hard to take notes, that’s the only shortfall. Overall, this WILL make you pass your exam if you’re consistently getting over 80%.