I look forward to the day that all FAA practical tests have ACS rather than PTS. I was originally planning on getting my private ASEL, got mired in the difficulty of obtaining a 3rd class medical, and decided to get my sport while waiting for FAA Aeromedical. Because the sport and private for ASEL are so similar, I never bothered to read the PTS, having already combed through the private ACS numerous times.

Now I teach ground and am a few hours shy of taking my sport CFI checkride, so it makes sense for me to have a copy of the "guiding document" for sport checkrides. In addition, sport CFI is included in this PTS document.

First, I find the PTS to be just a confusing document altogether. The sport PTS includes airplane, weight-shift, and powered parachute so the whole book is really dense when all the applicant is going to need is a small portion herein. I was reading through the sport CFI section and I was so confused about how I had never heard of some of the things I was expected to do before I even realized I was in the weight-shift sport CFI section of the book. There really aren't good header/footer labs to make this clear. The table of contents for sport airplane has two sections which are labeled section 1 and section 4. I don't know what happened to sections 2 and 3; they're probably lost in some bureaucratic nightmare somewhere.

The ACS for private pilot contains lists of all references that are useful to each task to be included in the checkride. No such luck here in the PTS. Not a big deal if you're just getting a sport certificate as you can mostly just read the private ACS and figure everything out from there. Not as much luck for sport CFIs.

All in all, you can't exactly avoid this book if you want to really know what goes into the sausage of your sport pilot or sport CFI checkride, but you'll wish you could. ( )