The Federal Aviation Administration will start putting sectional chart questions on the Part 107 knowledge test on October 26, 2026 that do not appear in the printed testing supplement applicants study from. The agency announced the change in its Airman Testing Community Advisory, and its September special edition repeats it.
The change applies to the Unmanned Aircraft General-Small test, the exam every new remote pilot takes at a PSI testing center. The new questions use images from current FAA VFR charts instead of the figures in the supplement. The FAA published two sample questions: one asks what airspace surrounds Millville Municipal Airport in New Jersey and whether a drone needs air traffic control authorization there, and the other asks which frequency to use at Grand Canyon National Park Airport when the tower is closed.
The printed supplement stays in the test center for now. The FAA has set no date for removing it, and the new chart questions will not be in it.
FAA Pulls Part 107 Chart Questions From Current Sectionals, Not the Supplement
The FAA’s August 2026 advisory says the Unmanned Aircraft General-Small test will include image-based questions “not found in the test supplements” from October 26, 2026. The images come from current FAA sectional charts, and the date is a correction: the June edition of the advisory said October 27.
The same change hits the Instrument Rating Airplane test on the same day, with excerpts from approach charts and low altitude enroute charts.
The work is part of what the FAA calls its Graphics Conversion Project, run with its testing contractor PSI Services. The agency is embedding the image inside each question so the printed supplement becomes unnecessary. The drone test already carries some embedded-image questions. The October 26 change is different because the chart excerpts are not in the supplement, and the FAA says it cannot preview them because an embedded image is part of a live test question.
The agency also says some questions may need measuring tools, that applicants will get the tools they need on screen, and that it cannot yet describe how those tools work. Any new on-screen tool will be announced in a future advisory before it reaches a test center.
Applicants who learned the exam from the supplement’s numbered figures lose a shortcut. One of the five trick questions Greg Reverdiau of Pilot Institute, a DroneXL partner, walked through in June 2025 hinged on reading an obstacle’s height off a supplement sectional excerpt, and another on what Class D airspace becomes when the tower closes. The October 26 questions ask the same things on charts nobody can study in advance.
The Sample Questions Ask for Millville’s Airspace and Grand Canyon’s Frequency
The first sample shows Millville Municipal Airport on the Washington sectional and asks what airspace surrounds it and whether a small drone needs ATC authorization. The answer is Class E, with authorization required. The second sample asks for Grand Canyon National Park Airport’s frequency when the tower is closed: 119.0.
Both answers sit on the chart for anyone who knows the legend. The dashed magenta ring around Millville is Class E to the surface, and the star after the Grand Canyon tower frequency marks a part-time tower whose frequency becomes the common traffic advisory frequency when it closes. Neither question asks for a number from a memorized figure.
The FAA points applicants to PSI’s sample test site to see the new format. Current sectional charts are free from the FAA’s digital VFR chart downloads, and they are the same charts the test images come from.
One in Six Part 107 Applicants Already Fails the Knowledge Test
The FAA’s 2025 knowledge test statistics list 73,914 Unmanned Aircraft General-Small tests taken last year, with a pass rate of 82.96% and an average score of 79.31%. Across all 293,516 FAA knowledge tests in 2025, the pass rate was 89.56%.
The drone exam is the FAA’s highest-volume knowledge test, ahead of the 44,657 private pilot airplane tests, and its pass rate sits below the average across all of them.
The recurrent test left the PSI centers first: the FAA allowed online recency training as a pandemic measure in April 2020, then replaced the recurrent exam with free online training for good under the Operations Over People rule in April 2021. The initial test is the one that still has to be taken in person.
DroneXL’s Take
This is the right change, and I’d have made it years ago. A remote pilot who can only answer airspace questions about the figures in the supplement has memorized a booklet, not learned to read a chart. The sectional is the document that tells you whether the field you’re about to fly near has a Class E surface area or a part-time tower, and it changes every 56 days. Testing on a current chart tests the thing you’ll actually do before a flight.
The 83% pass rate says the exam isn’t a formality, and the applicants who scrape through on figure recall are the ones this will catch. Download the sectional for your own area from the FAA, find every airport within 10 miles, and work out the airspace and the frequency for each one. If you can do that on a chart you’ve never seen, October 26 changes nothing for you.
Sources: FAA Airman Testing Community Advisory, August 2026, FAA Airman Testing Community Advisory, September 2026 Special Edition, FAA CY2025 Airman Knowledge Test Statistics
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
