so ive been flying my mavic for like two years now just recreational stuff but i want to start doing some real estate photography on the side and apparently i need this part 107 thing. honestly had no idea this existed until a client asked me if i was licensed and i just kind of nodded and then panicked later lol

anyway i looked it up and theres like a ton of study materials out there and i dont know which ones are actually worth paying for vs just using free stuff. also how hard is the test actually? some people online are saying its super easy and others are saying they failed it twice so i genuinely cant tell what to expect. im decent at reading stuff and memorizing but the airspace stuff looks like a foreign language to me

any advice appreciated, especially from people who maybe didnt have a aviation background going in

no aviation background here at all when i did mine about 18 months ago. honestly the airspace charts were the thing that tripped me up too but once it clicks it really clicks you know. i just watched a bunch of youtube videos, there's a guy called Pilot Institute that does free content and his sectional chart breakdowns are actually really good. i did end up paying for their full course but i think you could probably get away with just the free stuff if you're disciplined about it.

the test itself is 60 questions and you need a 70% to pass so 42 correct. the questions i got were pretty heavily weighted toward airspace, weather interpretation and some regulations stuff. took me maybe 6 weeks of studying maybe an hour a night. the testing center was just a normal computer testing place, nothing weird about it. just dont neglect the weather section, i almost did and it showed up way more than i expected.

the faa has free study materials on their website that people sleep on. like the actual aeronautical knowledge test supplement with all the figures they can pull from is right there as a pdf. i studied almost entirely off free stuff and passed first try. that said i spent a lot of time on the practice tests, there are a few sites that have question banks and i just hammered those until i was consistently getting like 85%+ before i booked the test.

real talk though the hardest part for most people is the sectional chart reading and TFR stuff. dont skip that even if it looks intimidating at first