From 26 October, the chart on your Part 107 exam may be one you have never seen

The FAA’s September 2026 Special Edition of the Airman Testing Community Advisory states that from 26 October 2026 the Unmanned Aircraft General test will include image-based questions not found in the test supplements. The date is 26, not 27: the June 2026 edition said 27 October, and the September edition corrected it and footnoted the change. Fetch the live PDF from faa.gov rather than a cached copy, which drops the corrected sentence.

What changes

Until now, every chart question on the exam drew its figure from FAA-CT-8080-2H, the supplement handed to you at the testing centre. That book has a finite number of plates, and a great deal of study material teaches the answers to those plates. A candidate who can recognise Figure 22 and recall what the questions about it ask has a skill that works exactly until the figure is different.

From 26 October, it will be. The FAA calls this the Graphics Conversion Project, and its purpose is to test whether you can read a chart, not whether you have seen this one.

What survives

A procedure. When an excerpt you have never seen appears, run the same sequence every time:

1. Locate the airport symbol and read its data block — name, tower frequency if any, elevation, runway length, CTAF.
2. Identify the ring or line around it and what it means. Solid blue is Class B; solid magenta is Class C; dashed blue is Class D; dashed magenta is Class E to the surface; a magenta vignette is Class E from 700 feet; no marking is Class G under Class E from 1,200.
3. Convert the ceiling. The charted number is MSL. Subtract the field elevation to know how much of that airspace sits above the ground you are standing on.
4. Scan for obstacles and read both numbers — the bold one is the top in MSL, the one in parentheses is the structure’s height above the ground, and the second is the one 14 CFR 107.51(b) cares about.
5. Then answer. Only now.

Rehearse the sequence, not the excerpt. The excerpt is the thing that changes.

What we did about it

Our chart questions use two kinds of image, and each is labelled. Most show the actual page of the FAA testing supplement, FAA-CT-8080-2H, with its figure and page number and a zoom, because that supplement is still handed out at the test center. The rest show excerpts drawn inside the product that reproduce no supplement plate, so the student also practices on a figure they have not seen elsewhere. In October we added fifteen chart-reading questions, thirteen of them on the supplement's own pages: airspace altitude figures, obstruction labels, the Unmanned Aircraft Activity symbol, TRSAs, the Washington DC FRZ, National Defense Airspace, caution notes, latitude and longitude, VFR checkpoints and waypoints, airways, Class B sector figures, private airports, approach control boxes, wildlife refuge labels and spot elevations. Each teaches a reading that works on any sectional, not a fact about one plate. The scanning sequence above and the four multi-step conversions are on the decoders page, and the bank drills each conversion.

None of this claims the exam will look like our excerpts. It claims the procedure transfers, which is the only claim that survives the date.

The four conversions, worked →