Why People Fail the FAA Part 107 Exam — And What to Do Before Your Retake
The drive home from the PSI testing center after a failed Part 107 exam is one of the worst drives you will take. You sat in a quiet room for two hours, answered 60 questions, and walked out thinking you had a shot. The screen showed otherwise.
In this episode, we break down exactly what causes most Part 107 failures — and it is almost never about intelligence or flying ability. It comes down to preparation method. The right method takes 10 to 20 hours. The wrong method takes 40 hours and ends in a $175 retake fee.
Whether you already failed or you are still studying, this episode tells you what actually separates people who pass from people who do not.
What you will learn:
What the FAA Part 107 exam actually tests — and why zero questions involve flying a drone
Why the official 92% pass rate is misleading and what it hides
What a sectional chart is, why it appears heavily on the exam, and why it causes most failures
The 5 mistakes that account for the majority of Part 107 failures
Why free YouTube prep often produces a $350 outcome instead of a $99 one
How to read your PSI score report and build a retake study plan from it
The 85% practice exam benchmark — the signal that you are actually ready to rebook
How the Red Raven pass guarantee works and what it covers
Episode Sections:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:01:01 - What the Part 107 Exam Actually Tests
00:04:45 - The 92% Pass Rate Is Misleading
00:06:08 - The 5 Mistakes That Cause Most Failures
00:08:55 - Sectional Charts Explained
00:10:54 - Reading METARs and Weather Reports
00:14:08 - The Real Cost of Failing
00:16:07 - What to Do After You Fail
00:17:27 - The IACRA System
Ready to Pass on your next attempt?
The Red Raven Part 107 Course was built specifically for people who want to pass the first time — or nail the retake after a failure.
Method-first: Structured curriculum that covers every exam topic in sequence, so you know when you have actually covered everything.
Practice-tested: Unlimited practice exams that mirror the format and difficulty of the real FAA test, so you can measure your actual readiness.
Zero risk: Pass guarantee — complete the course, take the exam, and if you do not pass, we reimburse your $175 retake fee.
Ready to start? Enroll at redravenuas.com/part107 or take our free 12-question practice test first at redravenuas.com/part107-practice-test.
Links & Resources
Free 12-Question Practice Test: https://www.redravenuas.com/part107-practice-test
Red Raven Part 107 Course: https://www.redravenuas.com/part107
Full Written Guide: https://www.redravenuas.com/blog/failed-part-107-exam
Red Raven UAS: https://www.redravenuas.com
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Imagine you're sitting down for a really crucial driving test. You know, you've practiced for weeks, your parallel parking is flawless, your mirror checks are totally automatic. Right, you're feeling confident. Exactly. So you walk into the DMV, you take a deep breath, and you hit starts on the testing computer. But then the first question isn't about steering or braking, it's about the structural integrity of highway concrete.
Oh wow. Yeah, that would throw anyone off. And then the second question is about like federal interstate commerce laws. By question three, you're suddenly calculating the load-bearing capacity of an overpass. You would probably assume you were in a completely wrong room. You'd think there was some kind of administrative mix-up. I mean, it completely violates any rational expectation of what a practical skills test is supposed to be.
You're there to prove you can operate a machine, not, you know, design the infrastructure it runs on. Right. And yet, that is the exact experience of almost everyone who walks in to take the FAA part 107 exam. Yeah, officially known as the unmanned aircraft general small knowledge test. Which in plain English is the mandatory federal certification you need if you want to fly a drone commercially. Welcome to the Red Raven UAS podcast. I'm your host, and I'm joined by our resident aviation expert to really unpack this bizarre testing phenomenon.
Glad to be here. It's such a complex topic. Before we jump in, for anyone joining us for the first time, I just want to quickly say who we are. Red Raven UAS provides customized drone training, program development, and expert consulting. At Red Raven, we work with public safety, utilities, and enterprise teams. And our focus is really on one thing, helping you launch and grow a drone program that's safe, compliant, and actually ready for your mission. We do the consulting, the strategy, and the hands-on training that, you know, turns an idea into a real operational tool. Visit redravenuas.com for consulting, training, and FAA Part 107 certification.
And check out the current special pricing on our Part 107 course. So our mission today is to explore the hidden complexities of the commercial airspace, figure out why so many aspiring commercial drone pilots fail this exam, and lay out the structural preparation required to actually pass it. It's a topic that sits at this really fascinating intersection between modern, highly accessible tech, and well, legacy aviation bureaucracy. So whether you are an aspiring commercial pilot yourself, maybe a business owner looking to hire one, or you're just fascinated by how the government regulates those invisible highways above our heads, we are going to reveal the unseen rules of modern airspace.
Let's get right into it. Yeah, let's start with the biggest jaw dropper first. The Part 107 exam is 60 questions long, and it contains absolutely zero questions about how to actually fly a drone. Zero. None at all. You won't see anything about joystick manipulation. Nothing about recovering from a wind stall. Not even the physics of the rotors.
Nope. Nothing about the physics of quadcopter rotors. I mean, I have to push back on the FAA's logic here just a bit. I understand safety is paramount, but isn't this massive overkill? Like, say I'm a real estate photographer right now. Okay, pretty common use case. Yeah. And my whole business model consists of just hovering my drone 50 feet over a suburban roof to take pictures of some shingles. Why on earth do I need to be tested on the same radio frequencies used by a news helicopter? I hear that complaint all the time. Right. Why doesn't the FAA just create a simpler low altitude test for basic commercial operations?
Well, because the airspace is incredibly fluid. The FAA's fundamental philosophy is that there is only one sky. One sky. Okay. Yeah. The moment you use that drone for commercial purposes, you are no longer just a hobbyist messing around in a park. You are entering the national airspace system. So you're considered an actual aviator. Exactly. You are an aviator sharing the same environment as a 737. Think about it this way. A medical transport helicopter making an emergency landing doesn't care that you're only trying to photograph a roof.
Yeah, that puts it in perspective. Right. If you are in their flight path and you don't know how to monitor their radio calls, or if you don't understand your altitude restrictions in that specific grid, you become a catastrophic hazard. Okay. So it's really about systemic awareness. The FAA is basically saying, we don't care how well you steer your little drone. We care that you know what room you're standing in.
That's a perfect way to put it. The passing score is a 70%. Yep. 70% to get your certificate. In traditional grading, a 70% is a C-. If you only need a C- to pass, it can't be that rigorous of a test. Right. And that assumption right there is the exact trap that catches thousands of test takers every single year. Wait, really? The 70% thing is a trap. Oh, absolutely. If you look at the official FAA data, the overall pass rate hovers around 92%. 92%. So like nine out of 10 people are walking out with a certificate? Well, yes, but we have to look at the methodology behind that data. That 92% figure aggregates every one. Reading what exactly? Meaning it includes thousands of people who went through rigorous structured professional aviation courses, people who basically attended modern flight school for drones. Oh, I see. So it's skewing the numbers.
Massively. Yeah. When you filter the data to isolate just the self-studiers of people who try to piece together the knowledge on their own, that pass rate plummets dramatically. Which creates this massive false sense of security. Someone sees that 92% stat online. They think about how they've been flying their drone around their neighborhood without crashing and they figure they can just wing it. Right. They think, "I'm a good pilot. I'll be fine." Then they sit down at the testing computer and counter questions written in the highly technical legacy language of aviation professionals and they fail.
It's like taking the highway engineering test at the DMV. Exactly. And the core takeaway is that feeling this exam is not a reflection of someone's intelligence. And it's definitely not a reflection of their mechanical flying skill. It's purely a reflection of a flawed preparation method. 100%. So let's follow the journey of that very predictable path to failure. Five fatal flaws.
Yeah. These are the classic pitfalls. Right. So the first thing a self-studier usually does is try to hack the process using free YouTube videos. Now, I use YouTube to fix my dishwasher, but for a federal aviation exam, it seems like a minefield. It's a huge minefield because it's entirely fragmented. YouTube algorithms are designed for engagement. Right. Not comprehensive curriculum design. So you get what's popular, not necessarily what's educational. Exactly.
You might find a brilliantly animated video explaining weather fronts, but the algorithm might never serve you the subsequent video on airport traffic patterns. There's no diagnostic readiness check to ensure you haven't left a massive blind spot in your knowledge. And honestly, worse than a blind spot is actively learning the wrong information. The internet is permanent, which brings us to mistake number four, the danger of outdated study materials.
This is a big one. Yeah. The FAA changes rules frequently. Like the rules around remote ID. Yes. Perfect example. From a mechanical standpoint, remote ID is essentially a digital license plate system. Right. Where the drone continuously broadcasts its telemetry, like its location altitude, and even the control station's location via Bluetooth or wifi to local receivers. Exactly. It was this massive regulatory shift designed to increase accountability in the airspace. Yeah. But if you are setting a highly viewed tutorial that was uploaded back in, say, 2019. The creator isn't going to teach you the intricacies of remote ID compliance.
Right. Because the mandate didn't even exist yet in its current form. That's wild. Or take the updated rules on night flying. Our sources point out that the FAA doesn't just test you on the legal hours you can fly in the dark. No, they go way deeper. They actually test you on the physiological mechanics of human vision.
Yes. The aeromedical factors. You need to understand how the rods and cones in your eyes function differently in low light environments. I was fascinated by the concept of autokinesis mentioned in the notes. Oh, autokinesis is wild. Yeah. It says, "If you stare at a single stationary light in the dark for a few seconds, your brain loses its visual reference points and the light actually appears to start moving around." It's a terrifying optical illusion if you are piloting an aircraft.
I can imagine. If a drone pilot doesn't understand the mechanism of autokinesis, they might make sudden erratic corrective maneuvers to avoid a light that isn't actually moving. And end up potentially flying their drone directly into a physical obstacle. Exactly. The FAA expects you to know how your own eyeballs betray you at night. That is just incredible. So the self-studier is already dealing with fragmented, potentially outdated info on human biology and digital tracking. But then they hit the absolute wall. Mistake number two. The sectional charts.
The sectional charts. According to the data, misunderstanding these charts is the single biggest cause of exam failures. And it's easy to see why. They're incredibly intimidating. If you haven't seen one, imagine a topographic map of a city and then imagine someone layered complex, multicolored geometric shapes, numbers, and intersecting lines all over it. To me, the best way to understand a sectional chart is to think of it as an architectural blueprint of an invisible building in the sky. Oh, I like that. It tells you exactly where the ceiling is, where the walls are, and who is legally allowed in each room. Let's actually break one down instead of just saying they're hard to read. Sure.
Let's say Class B airspace, which surrounds the busiest airports. Okay, Class B. The structure of Class B is often described as an upside down wedding cake. Right. So at the surface level, right around the airport runway, the airspace is highly restricted. That's the small bottom tier of the cake. Yeah. But as you move, say, five miles away from the airport, that restricted airspace doesn't start at the ground anymore. It might start at 2,000 feet up and extend to 10,000 feet, catching the large passenger jets as they descend. Precisely.
So a drone pilot standing five miles from the airport might be standing in uncontrolled Class G airspace, legally allowed to fly their drone up to 400 feet. Okay. So they're safe on the ground. Yes. But they need to be able to look at that sectional chart, read the solid blue lines and the fraction numbers printed next to them, and realize that the invisible ceiling of their room is actually the floor of the Class B airspace directly above them. If you can't read the blueprint, you literally don't know when you are crossing from your safe room into a hallway filled with 737s. Exactly. And you can't just guess your way through a sectional chart question on the exam.
You either know how to decipher the specific hue of magenta line versus a blue line, or you don't. And the visual complexity of the maps is matched by the textual complexity of the weather reports, which is another huge hurdle. Part 107 requires pilots to read METARs, right? Yes. Meteorological terminal air reports. I have an example of a METAR right here from our notes.
If a student encounters this on the test, it honestly looks like a typo. It really does. Read it out. I'm going to read it exactly as it appears. It says, KORD 041651019007KT10SMBKN040. To the untrained eye, it is complete gibberish. It looks like a terrible Wi-Fi password. Right. But to an aviator, it paints a very precise picture of the sky. Walk me through it.
Let's decode that string of text together. Okay. So first KORD, that is the airport identifier for Chicago O'Hare. Got it. Then we have 041651Z. That means this observation was taken on the fourth day of the month at 1651 Zulu time. Zulu time being Greenwich Mean Time. Exactly. Okay. Then we have the 1907KT. That chunk is the wind. The wind is blowing from a heading of 190 degrees at seven knots.
Okay. And 10SM. That means visibility is 10 statute miles. And finally, BKN040 means there is a broken layer of clouds at 4000 feet. Okay. But seriously, why is it coded like a World War II Enigma machine? We have satellites and high resolution weather apps with great user interfaces. Why does the FAA force modern drone pilots to read a string of letters and numbers like that?
Well, it comes down to legacy technology and bandwidth. Historically, these reports were transmitted over teletype machines to really remote outposts and aircraft with incredibly limited bandwidth. Ah, so keeping it short was vital. Every single character costs time and money. The aviation industry built its entire global infrastructure around this highly compressed data format. And they just never changed it.
Even today, a computerized flight system can ingest thousands of reports in a fraction of a second because they are so lightweight. The FAA requires you to speak the native language of the system, regardless of how advanced your iPad weather app is. So our hypothetical self-studier has to teach themselves upside down invisible wedding cakes and decode teletype weather shorthand, which brings us to the actual testing environment, mistakes three and five. Right. Never taking a full practice exam and scheduling the test prematurely. The sources identify scheduling too soon as a massive error.
Oh, definitely. People will run through a few free online quizzes, score 75% and think they are totally ready since the passing grade is only 70%. But Red Raven's materials highlight a really fascinating psychological variable here. The nervousness tax. The nervousness tax is very real. Taking a timed 60 question exam in a highly monitored sterile testing center triggers a natural adrenaline response. The unfamiliar computer interface, the ticking clock, the inability to look up a confusing acronym, all that cognitive load naturally costs the average test taker anywhere from five to 10 points. So if you are walking in with a baseline knowledge level of 75% and you get hit with a seven point nervousness tax because you're dropped to a 68% and you fail, you shouldn't even consider booking your slot at the testing center until you are consistently scoring 85% or higher on full length timed practice exams. Your worst day in that testing chair needs to still result in a passing grade because we really need to look at the economics of failure here. Falling below that 70% mark carries some heavy consequences. Yeah, the map is pretty brutal. It is. It costs $175 just to sit down and take the exam. If you fail, there is no governmental grace period or free retake. Not at all.
You have to pay another $175 to try again. So immediately a failed attempt means you are out $350. But honestly, the financial hit for the testing fee is actually the smallest part of the problem. Really? What's the bigger penalty? The real penalty is time. The FAA enforces a mandatory 14 day waiting period before you are legally permitted to sit for a retake. Two weeks is a massive delay if you are trying to operate a business. Imagine you have a client lined up for a commercial roof inspection or maybe a real estate agency waiting on aerial site maps. That two to four week delay translates directly into lost contracts and lost income. Exactly. You could be bleeding thousands of dollars in missed opportunity cost simply because you tried to save a little money by avoiding a structured study course. It's the definition of stepping over dollars to pick up dimes.
It really is. And this operational friction is precisely what informed the methodology behind Red Raven UAS. So their approach basically replaces that fragmented YouTube scramble with a linear comprehensive structure. Right. They focus heavily on those failure points we just dissected. They run students through unlimited randomized practice exams that heavily feature sectional chart analysis, airspace classifications, and meat-r decoding. Which mitigates that massive risk, like risking $350 plus on a failed self-study attempt versus Red Raven's $99 course. They also provide a free 12 question practice test specifically built around those toughest subjects we mention.
It acts as a pressure test. Right. You can find out in 10 minutes if you actually understand classy airspace or if you were about to walk into a $175 buzzsaw at the testing center. But what happens if someone listening to us right now is already in that situation? What if they took the test yesterday, fell victim to the 92% trap, and failed?
The immediate reaction is usually panic, followed by this urge to just reschedule the exam for 14 days later and study the exact same free materials just, you know, harder. Which is statistically doomed to fail again. Exactly. The crucial first step is to obtain your official PSI score report. PSI is the third party contractor that actually administers these tests for the FAA, right? Yes. And when you fail, PSI doesn't just hand you a piece of paper with a red F on it. They provide a detailed breakdown of your performance by subject area tied directly to the FAA's Airman certification standards. The notes call it a diagnostic autopsy of your failure.
That's exactly what it is. It will reveal exactly where the structural integrity of your knowledge collapsed. You might find that you score perfectly on the regulations regarding visual line of sight, but you scored a 20% on the weather theory and aeronautical decision making sections. So once you have that autopsy, you completely abandon your previous study method. You pivot to a structured curriculum and aggressively target the exact knowledge codes where you failed. Yes. And even after you conquer the test, there is one final hurdle that traps a surprising number of people. Oh, the IACRA system. The IACRA system. The integrated airman certification and reading application.
The web portal that feels like it was designed in the 1990s and literally never updated. It is the pinnacle of government digital infrastructure. Truly passing the part 107 test doesn't automatically mail a certificate to your house. You have to log into IACRA, link your test ID, undergo a TSA background check, and formally apply for the rating. And the interface is notoriously counterintuitive.
Many people pass their exam, get confused by the paperwork, and just assume their certificate is in the mail. Only to realize months later, they aren't legally certified yet. Navigating that bureaucracy is a skill in itself, which is why structured programs like Red Raven include walkthroughs for the paperwork, not just the aviation theory. It's all part of the process. So zooming out, the overarching lesson for you, the listener, is that the part 107 exam is not a hurdle. It is a filter. The FAA is filtering out people who treat drones purely as consumer electronics.
Passing requires you to adopt the mindset of an aviator. You have to respect the airspace enough to learn its native language. The meet R codes, the sectional blueprints, the physiology of night vision. And if you fail, it is a method problem, not a personal failing. Fix your method, respect the complexity of the sky, and you fix the result. Exactly.
I think when we pull back and look at the trajectory of the industry, understanding this regulatory baseline leaves us with a pretty provocative question about the future. Yeah, the airspace is definitely not getting any emptier. Where does this go from here? Well, consider the pace of commercial scaling. Right now, part 107 covers a pilot flying a single drone, but the horizon is rapidly approaching where major logistics companies are deploying automated delivery fleets. We're looking at medical networks, using drones to transport blood samples across cities, and agricultural hubs using swarms of drones to monitor crops simultaneously.
And all of those vehicles have to integrate seamlessly into the exact same airspace filled with Cessnas and new helicopters. Exactly. So if today's baseline part 107 exam requires you to decode teletype weather reports and read manual topographic charts, what happens in five years? Will the next generation of commercial drone pilots be required to pass exams on artificial intelligence traffic management algorithms?
Well, they need to understand the complex telemetry physics of coordinating a swarm of 50 autonomous vehicles, avoiding a single medical helicopter. It makes the current tests look like basic addition compared to calculus. The sky isn't the limit anymore. It's the foundation for an entirely new era of technological integration. Very true. Next time you look up and see a commercial drone hovering over a construction site, remember the invisible architecture of the sky it's operating in. The person holding that controller didn't just learn how to push a joystick forward. They had to prove they could navigate a complex 3D system moving at hundreds of miles per hour. They pass the real driving test. They earn their place in the airspace. Thanks for listening to the Red Raven UAS podcast.
Visit redravenuas.com for consulting, training, and FAA Part 107 certification, and check out the current special pricing on our Part 107 course.
About Red Raven UAS
Red Raven UAS was founded by public safety and drone industry veterans who understood the gap between having drones and knowing how to deploy them effectively. Our team brings together decades of real-world operational experience — including building one of the nation's first major public safety drone programs — and deep expertise in the commercial UAS sector across energy, utilities, and infrastructure.
We work with agencies, utility operators, and enterprise organizations to build drone programs designed around their specific requirements — not a generic course deck. No hardware sales. No one-size-fits-all curriculum. Field-tested instruction from people who have actually built and operated UAS programs at scale.
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