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MockDPE: AI Built by Pilots, for Pilots
Ace your FAA pilot checkride with a realistic AI examiner
8 followers
Ace your FAA pilot checkride with a realistic AI examiner
8 followers
An FAA exam is the most important a pilot will ever take, costing $1000+ and going on their permanent record. MockDPE makes verbal practice possible through an AI DPE (examiner) using a custom aircraft, live weather, and real world conditions. MockDPE provides regulatory citations, grades with 96.3% consistency, and is validated by flight instructors. After each exam, you'll receive a breakdown against the FAA ACS so you know what to study. Test your IFR knowledge for free at https://mockdpe.org
Hey Product Hunt! My name is Kevin. I'm a backend engineer by trade, but also a commercial pilot.
Anyone who's gone through training for an FAA pilot certificate knows the stress of a checkride, expensive and high-stakes. You sit across from a Designated Pilot Examiner (DPE) who probes your knowledge of regulations, aircraft systems, and weather for several hours. I've seen DPEs charge anywhere from $600 to $2,500, plus a failure stays on your FAA record forever.
When I was prepping for my own checkrides, the available tools felt dated and not realistic enough to accurately replicate the exam. Everyday AI tools (and even some aviation-specific ones) don't truly understand aviation content, and the other options are totally non-immersive, such as videos and flashcards. Learning from my own training, I built MockDPE to give students a way to practice their checkride before it counts for real.
MockDPE runs full, voice-based oral exams against the official FAA Airman Certification Standards (ACS). You pick your aircraft, customize the route of flight, and upload an optional study guide or gouge. MockDPE then fetches live aviation weather, weaves real world conditions into an immersive scenario across 16,000+ US airports, and grades you task-by-task against the ACS, just as you will be when you sit across from your real DPE.
Getting a small LLM to evaluate a free-response aviation answer accurately and consistently is harder than it sounds: my initial approach of using plain RAG fell far short. Looking back at the git history, it took just under 200 iterations of prompt and system refinements to land on the current architecture.
I chose to use several smaller models, each given a narrow, rigid task so none of them get overwhelmed by too many rules or instructions. A dedicated grader model scores each user claim against injected reference cards (FAR, AIM, IFH, and other aviation content) and is forced to pull from official sources via tool calls to provide a regulatory citation of why the response is right or wrong. The result of this architecture and many training iterations is 96.3% grading consistency across runs, plus validation from instrument flight instructors.
Anyone can run a full mock checkride for free, which is enough for a few hours of focused instrument practice. At the end, you'll receive an area-by-area breakdown of exactly where you should focus your study efforts before the real exam. If you want to dive deeper, use this link for unlimited exam sessions, focused practice, and a personalized learning mode: https://mockdpe.org/r/PRODUCTHUNT
The question I keep coming back to is, at what point trusting an LLM evaluator makes sense. My answer to this was when it feels like a real evaluation, with the model having access to official resources, using mandatory regulatory citations, and earning validation from people who do this for a living. If anyone here has differing opinions, especially those who have worked with LLM evaluators, I'd love to hear your thoughts on my approach.
hey, this is really neat! i got my PPL last summer and i was looking into IFR training too. i ended up not pursuing it because we can almost never fly IFR here in the winter. i'm gonna spend some time on here though, thanks for sharing!
@benliu hey Ben, thanks for checking in! I did my initial flight training in the northeastern US so I ran into a lot of the same issues not being able to fly IFR in the winter because of icing. Luckily I'm based in Florida now, so my icing concerns are largely a thing of the past. I'd be happy to connect personally on Discord if you'd like, feel free to shoot me a friend request @mockdpe :)
@burrowstudio sent thanks!