Most Part 107 chart advice amounts to a symbol table and a wish of good luck. That works right up until the exam hands you a chart excerpt you have never studied — which, from 26 October 2026, is exactly what it will do.

What transfers is not the picture. It is the order you interrogate it in. This guide is that order, worked on real values from a current sectional.

Why this is worth the hours

Two facts, both from primary sources.

Airspace is 20% of the exam. That figure is from PSI’s Applicant Information Bulletin, effective 29 September 2025 — the blueprint the FAA told applicants to use after declaring the ACS weighting table obsolete. Roughly twelve of the sixty scored questions.

From 26 October 2026, the chart images may be ones you cannot have seen. In its August 2026 Airman Testing Community Advisory the FAA said the test will include image-based questions using images not found in the testing supplement, drawn from current VFR charts, and that the specific images cannot be previewed. The June 2026 edition gave this date as 27 October; the August edition corrects it to 26 October, with a footnote reading “Corrected date from the previous edition of this advisory.”

So: a fifth of the test, on material you cannot pre-memorise. Learn the procedure instead.

The lookup, in order

Every airspace question on this exam is the same five steps. Do them in this sequence and you will not skip the one that decides the answer.

1. Find the point. The town, the airport, the tower named in the question.
2. Identify the boundary you are inside. Solid blue, solid magenta, dashed blue, dashed magenta, shaded vignette, or nothing at all.
3. Read the numbers on that boundary. Ceiling over floor, or ceiling over SFC.
4. Convert if the question gives you AGL. Airspace floors are MSL. Your altitude is AGL. Add the terrain.
5. Apply 107.41. Class B, C, D, or surface-designated Class E means authorization. Everything else does not.

Steps 1 to 3 are chart reading. Steps 4 and 5 are the regulation. Most wrong answers come from doing step 5 without step 4, or step 3 without step 2.

The airport data block, decoded

This is where the most questions per square inch live, and where symbols carry more meaning than numbers. Two towered airports from the St. Louis sectional, side by side:

Line on the chart	ST LOUIS DOWNTOWN (CPS)	MIDAMERICA ST LOUIS (BLV)
Tower	CT - 119.925 ★ Ⓒ	CT - 128.25
Data line	413 *L 70	459 L 100
Field elevation	413 ft MSL	459 ft MSL
Longest runway	7,000 ft	10,000 ft
Lighting	Limitations exist — check the Chart Supplement	Sunset to sunrise, no restriction
Tower hours	Part time	Continuous
CTAF	119.925	None charted

Four things to take from that table, in rough order of how often they decide a question:

• Runway length is in hundreds of feet. 70 is 7,000. 100 is 10,000. Not 70 feet, not 100,000.
• The asterisk before L means lighting limitations. No asterisk means lighting runs sunset to sunrise. One character, opposite meanings.
• The star after the tower frequency means the tower is part time. The circled Ⓒ then marks that frequency as the CTAF for when it is closed.
• No star and no circled C means no CTAF is charted — because the tower never closes. A towered airport does not automatically have one.

That last point is the kind of thing a symbol table will not teach you, because it is about an absence. Nothing is printed. You have to notice that nothing is printed.

CTAF is not always 122.8

At a non-towered airport, the circled Ⓒ marks the CTAF, and it can be any frequency. SPARTA COMMUNITY-HUNTER FLD on the same chart reads:

SPARTA COMMUNITY-HUNTER FLD (SAR)
AWOS-3PT 118.375
538 *L 40 123.075 Ⓒ

Three numbers, three different things. 123.075 is the CTAF, because the circled C follows it. 118.375 is the AWOS — an automated weather broadcast you listen to and never transmit on. 538 is the field elevation, not a frequency at all.

A question that offers you all three is not testing whether you know 122.8. It is testing whether you read the symbol that assigns the role.

Obstructions carry two numbers, and only one of them is about the structure

An obstruction on a sectional is labelled with a figure and a figure in parentheses. The top number is the top of the obstruction above mean sea level. The number in parentheses is its height above the ground it stands on.

So a group obstruction charted 1155 (700) tops out at 1,155 feet MSL and rises 700 feet from its base — which means the ground under it sits at roughly 455 feet MSL. Subtraction, every time.

The trap is comparing two of them. On the same chart:

Charted	Top (MSL)	Height (AGL)	Ground beneath (MSL)
933 (253)	933	253	680
857 (375)	857	375	482

The first has the higher top. The second is the taller structure, by 122 feet. If the question is “which one reaches higher above the ground beneath it,” the higher MSL number is the wrong answer.

This matters beyond the exam. When you are working out whether 107.51(b) lets you go above 400 feet AGL near a structure, the figure that governs is the one in parentheses.

One more symbol worth knowing: a doubled obstruction marker means a group of obstructions standing close together, and the figures describe the tallest of them.

The large numerals in each quadrangle

Each quadrangle on a sectional carries a large blue numeral — a big digit followed by a smaller one. That is the Maximum Elevation Figure, and it is read as thousands and hundreds of feet MSL. A 1 followed by a 3 is 1,300 feet MSL. A 1 followed by a 9 is 1,900.

Two things it is, and one thing it is not.

• It is the highest known feature in that quadrangle — terrain or a structure, whichever is higher.
• It is expressed in MSL, like everything else vertical on the chart except obstruction parentheses.
• It is not an airspace floor and not a legal ceiling. It tells you what is up there, not what you may do.

Practice questions on this

The free 90-question Regulations drill runs in your browser and names the source behind every answer. The full version adds 25 questions built on real, current FAA sectional excerpts — actual charts rather than redrawn diagrams, captioned with the chart name and validity dates the way the FAA captions its own samples.

Read next: 14 CFR 107.41: The Two Airspace Authorization Traps That Catch Part 107 Pilots • Do You Have to Read All of Part 107 to Pass the Knowledge Test?

Tracking the change: 26 October is not the day the testing supplement disappears — the FAA has not set that date, whatever you have read elsewhere. What is confirmed, what is not, and the two questions I am still waiting on the FAA to answer: Part 107 test updates, checked weekly.

← Back to the Part 107 Study Hub for the free drill and more plain-English guides to the regulations.

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Chart values in this guide are read from the St. Louis Sectional effective 9 July 2026 to 3 September 2026. Charts are reissued every 56 days and values change — always work from a current chart. Study aid only. Not flight instruction and not legal advice. These are original questions written to the ACS standards from public FAA material, not FAA exam questions.