What Should Happen on Your Two-Year Revalidation Flight? New CAA Guidance for Pilots and Instructors
Many pilots have historically described their revalidation flight as “an hour with an instructor”. That description tells you how long to book, but leaves quite a lot of room for interpretation once you’ve strapped in. A pleasant local flight and a couple of circuits can fill an hour remarkably easily.
The CAA’s new CAP3303 gives that hour a clearer purpose. Published in September 2026, it provides instructor guidance for the refresher training flight used for single-engine piston (SEP) and touring motor glider (TMG) revalidation by experience. It sets out the skills instructors should refresh, with particular attention to situations that can catch a qualified pilot out.
For pilots, it explains what to expect. For instructors, it offers a useful framework for planning a flight around the person in the other seat. Its recommendations need to be read alongside the applicable regulations: CAP3303 is new CAA guidance, and publishing it does not turn every suggested exercise into a new legal requirement.
Contents
What the refresher flight is for
The refresher flight is training. CAP3303 explicitly says it is not a test or proficiency check. The instructor can explain an exercise, demonstrate it where useful and give you another attempt. You’re there to refresh skills and identify anything that needs further work.
That purpose deserves a proper lesson plan. A pilot who flies cross-country every weekend may benefit from revisiting stalls and forced landings. Someone whose recent flying consists mainly of local circuits may need time on navigation and diversion decisions. The same familiar circuit can conceal quite different gaps in experience.
For a UK Part-FCL SEP/TMG rating, the experience route currently requires 12 hours in the relevant class during the rating’s validity period, including six hours in the final 12 months, six hours as pilot in command, and 12 take-offs and landings. Refresher training of at least one hour with an FI or CRI forms part of that requirement, subject to the applicable exemption for another aeroplane class or type check, test or assessment of competence. That exemption does not extend to NPPL (A) revalidation by experience.
CAP3303 also addresses single-engine ratings on national licences. Check the requirements for the licence and rating you actually hold, particularly where transitional arrangements apply. An hour of training alone cannot complete revalidation if the remaining experience or endorsement requirements are outstanding.
The useful work starts before take-off
Expect a conversation about your recent flying, the aircraft you use and anything you’d like to practise. Tell the instructor if it has been years since your last stall exercise or if diversion planning has quietly become a sequence of taps on a screen. That gives them something useful to work with.
CAP3303 calls for a briefing covering threat and error management, including decisions that prevent inadvertent entry into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC). In practical terms, you might discuss the point at which lowering cloud would make you turn back, which diversion remains available and how much spare capacity you have to find it.
Pre-flight preparation should demonstrate effective use of regulated aeronautical information from NATS AIS and weather information from the Met Office’s MAVIS service. Bring the information you would use for a real flight and be ready to explain your choices. An instructor can learn a lot from how you interpret a forecast or identify relevant NOTAMs.
For instructors, agree the training objectives and simulation boundaries before departure. Explain who will control the throttle during a simulated power problem, how the exercise will end and what safety margins you’ll use. Surprise can be discussed and managed without making the training itself ambiguous.
Stalls and partial power loss take centre stage
CAP3303 says that, as a minimum, airborne training should include recognition of and recovery from stall scenarios, together with simulated partial engine power loss during different phases of flight. It separately asks instructors to consider practice forced landings, engine failures after take-off and dead-reckoning exercises.
The emphasis on stall scenarios gives the handling work a practical setting. An instructor might relate stall awareness to a distracted approach or an attempt to maintain height with insufficient power, using safe altitude and the aircraft’s approved techniques. Recognising the developing situation early is part of the learning, alongside the recovery itself.
A partial power loss presents a particularly awkward decision. The engine is still making noise, yet the aircraft may no longer deliver the climb or level-flight performance you expected. That remaining noise can encourage you to wait for things to improve while your options steadily narrow.
Training can explore how you recognise that change: a deteriorating climb, an unexpected loss of speed, rough running or engine indications that no longer match the selected power. The first task is to maintain control and an appropriate airspeed. Diagnosis and any aircraft-specific checks have to fit within the height and time available.
The instructor can then change the context. Near the ground, landing ahead or within a suitable forward area may be the available option. At a safe height, you can work through whether a return or diversion is achievable with the performance remaining, and what happens if the engine stops completely. Continuing towards the original destination needs a defensible reason; the fact that the engine is still running provides very little reassurance on its own.
Those choices deserve discussion before the flight and practice under supervision. There is no universal turn-back height or throttle setting that makes every scenario safe. The aircraft’s procedures, terrain and actual performance determine what is feasible, and the instructor must keep the simulation within safe limits.
Navigation when the moving map goes quiet
The navigation guidance will interest anyone who now reaches for SkyDemon before unfolding a chart. CAP3303 recognises VFR moving-map devices and includes their use in training. It also asks for suitable evidence of dead-reckoning ability without reference to moving maps.
Dead reckoning gives you an estimated position from a known starting point, using heading, speed and elapsed time, with an allowance for wind. A short leg can reveal whether you still have that picture in your head. Which way should the next landmark appear? When should you reach it? How will you recognise that you’ve drifted?
A useful exercise might start with a planned heading and an estimated time to a recognisable feature. The pilot flies the leg without consulting the moving map, while the instructor maintains the necessary safety oversight. Comparing the estimate with the eventual position then gives the debrief something specific to discuss.
The moving map deserves attention too. Can you interpret the airspace around your route, choose a sensible diversion and operate the device without losing your lookout? If the screen becomes unavailable, knowing roughly where you are buys time to use another source of information. Discovering that you have been following the symbol without following the journey is an uncomfortable moment to have alone.
Refreshing the theory beforehand leaves more of the flight available for applying it. QuizAero Bitesize can help you revisit navigation and the principles behind aircraft handling before discussing those subjects with your instructor.
Why the CAA has chosen these subjects
CAP3303 connects its priorities with skills that many GA pilots rarely practise and with overload that can lead to poor decisions, loss of control, handling accidents and airspace infringements. A flight can become demanding very quickly when a technical problem arrives during a navigation task.
That makes a realistic scenario useful. A simulated power reduction on a navigation leg creates a reason to select a landing option, consider the surrounding airspace and communicate a decision while continuing to fly accurately. The instructor can adjust the workload to the pilot’s experience and pause or simplify the exercise when learning would benefit.
Weather decisions belong in that discussion throughout. Consider a lowering cloud base on the route home: when would you abandon the plan, and where could you go while remaining clear of cloud and terrain? Rehearsing that decision in a briefing lets you examine the temptation to press on without exposing yourself to the real conditions.
What a well-planned hour could look like
For a reasonably current SEP pilot, a local refresher flight could begin with a departure and climb to a suitable training area. General handling provides an opportunity to check trimming and lookout before practising stall recognition and recovery in selected configurations.
The instructor could introduce a simulated partial power problem at a safe height, discussing what the remaining performance permits. A short navigation leg could follow, with a dead-reckoning estimate and a comparison against the moving map. If conditions and progress allow, a practice forced landing can lead naturally into a recovery and return to the circuit.
An engine failure after take-off (EFATO) deserves explicit attention in the briefing, including local landing options and the danger of an unsuitable turn back. Any airborne simulation must be planned and controlled by the instructor. The session could finish with an approach and go-around, followed by a landing and a proper debrief.
This is a possible sequence for a lesson. The instructor should adapt it to the aircraft and pilot, allowing additional time when an exercise needs work. Trying to squeeze every item into the final ten minutes creates exactly the sort of workload the flight is supposed to help you manage.
CAP3303 says the training should normally be one flight of at least an hour. Where aircraft, weather or related operational limitations make that impractical, it allows at least an hour of instruction across two flights, with certification only after the full required flight time is complete. The briefing and debrief require time on the ground as well.
The debrief and the signature
After landing, the instructor should explain what went well and identify anything that needs more practice. A useful debrief might pinpoint a late diversion decision or an untidy recovery, then agree how to improve it. “All fine” gives you very little to take into your next flight.
CAP3303 distinguishes recording the instructional flight time in your logbook from completing the rating revalidation. It says the instructor should make the revalidation endorsement where all requirements have been met and the flying demonstrated is of an appropriate standard. If further flight training is needed, the guidance says the instructor is not obliged to complete that endorsement.
The person signing must also hold the appropriate authority. For Part-FCL SEP/TMG revalidation, an instructor needs the relevant FCL.945 privileges; completing a lesson with an instructor does not automatically establish their authority to sign every licence or rating. Confirm the arrangements when booking, with enough time before expiry to resolve any further training or paperwork.
For pilots, this is an opportunity to revisit exercises you may have left untouched since training and ask questions that rarely arise on a routine trip. For instructors, CAP3303 provides considerably more direction for making the session useful. An hour with an instructor is valuable time: arrive with a clear idea of what you’d like to fly better afterwards.
QuizAero Bitesize is our online ground school, with explanations that can help you refresh the navigation and handling theory behind these exercises. The video below introduces the course, so you can see how it could support your preparation for the flight.
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