DGCA stands for the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, and its written examination is five papers, four options a question, and one clock you cannot see running. Here is all of it in one place.
People search for “DGCA examination” meaning several different things: the written papers, the portal you book them on, the medical, or the whole licence process. This page is about the written papers, which is what the phrase almost always turns out to mean. Here is what they are, who runs them, how they are marked, and the two rules that decide how long your prep can take.
DGCA stands for the Directorate General of Civil Aviation. It is India’s civil aviation regulator, part of the Ministry of Civil Aviation, and among many other things it licenses pilots. The written examinations are run by its Central Examination Organisation, and everything you do as a candidate happens on the examination portal at pariksha.dgca.gov.in: registration, your Computer Number, booking a paper, your admit card and your result.
The second portal, eGCA, is a different system for the licence itself. The two get mixed up constantly, and the mix-up costs people sessions. If what you want to do is sit a paper, you want Pariksha. Our guide to getting a Computer Number covers the very first step, which you have to finish before you can book anything at all.
For a Commercial Pilot Licence on aeroplanes, the theory side is five papers: Air Navigation, Aviation Meteorology, Air Regulation, Technical General and Technical Specific. That list is not folklore, it is the licensing requirement: DGCA publishes it in CAR Section 7, Series B, Part I, the Civil Aviation Requirement that governs flight crew licensing. A Performance paper is added only for the heavier aeroplane categories.
Two things students get wrong about that list. Technical Specific is a CPL paper, not something you only meet later at ATPL level. And RTR(A), the restricted radio telephony test, is not one of the five at all: it is a separate radio licence with its own written part and its own practical, and DGCA took it over from the communications ministry’s WPC wing in late 2025. We treat it separately too, in the RTR exam guide. If you want the topic list behind each of the five, the DGCA exam syllabus page breaks them down subject by subject.
The papers are computer-based and multiple choice, four options with one correct answer. There is no negative marking, which has one practical consequence worth internalising now: never leave a question blank. A guess is free.
DGCA does not publish a fixed, year-to-year time limit per paper, so any blog that gives you a confident number for it is guessing. The duration for your paper is printed in your session instructions and on your admit card. Read it there.
You need 70 per cent to pass, which is the figure the eligibility requirement itself states, and each paper is cleared on its own. There is no aggregate and no compensating a weak subject with a strong one. Clearing three papers well and failing the fourth means you have cleared three papers and failed the fourth.
A pass is valid for five years, and this is the rule that quietly shapes everyone’s plan. The clock starts at your first pass, and every remaining paper has to be cleared inside that window or your earliest passes lapse and have to be retaken. There is no published limit on how many attempts a paper takes, so the constraint on your prep is not a number of tries, it is time.
You may have heard that a failed paper forces a fixed waiting period, often quoted as 42 days. That number is not on any official DGCA page, and the sources that repeat it do not even agree with each other. In practice, what you wait for is the next sitting you can book.
DGCA publishes a programme of examinations for each year. The shape of it has been steady: a handful of regular sittings spread roughly quarterly, plus a longer list of On-Line On-Demand sittings through the year, mostly used by candidates re-attempting a paper. Between the two you get far more chances than the quarterly rhythm suggests, which is worth knowing before you panic about a missed sitting. The dates are published annually and marked tentative, so read them off the programme rather than off a rule of thumb.
What does hurt is the booking window. Registration for a session opens for a short stretch, often only four to seven days, and it closes well before the exam itself. There is no rolling deadline and no reminder email if you are not watching. Our DGCA exam calendar page explains how to track the notice board, and it deliberately does not print dates, because the dates change every year and a copied date is worse than no date.
Fees are charged per paper, paid online through the government’s Bharatkosh gateway, and they are non-refundable. That last word is the one that matters: a paper you book and do not turn up for is simply money gone, and a lot of booked papers go unwritten every year.
| Sitting type | Fee per paper |
|---|---|
| Regular session | ₹2,500 |
| On-demand (OLOD) | ₹5,000 |
| Oral re-attempt (second or third) | ₹500 |
Your admit card is published on Pariksha and emailed a few days before the paper. Download it as soon as it appears, because the portal is slowest exactly when everybody wants it. Papers are sat at DGCA-approved online test centres in major cities, you choose your centre when you book, and the popular ones fill fast. Carry the admit card and a valid government photo ID.
Results go up on the Pariksha pilot notice board as PDFs, usually within about a week. There is no result email to wait for, and no ranking to compare yourself against. It is a threshold, not a competition: 70 per cent, paper by paper.
The logistics above are the part you can settle in an afternoon. The examination itself is the part that takes months, and the honest way to prepare for a multiple choice paper is to answer a great many multiple choice questions and then find out why the ones you missed were wrong. That is what the DGCA question bank is for, and every chapter in it opens five questions to anybody, with the correct answer shown and no account needed, through the free question bank page. When you want to find out whether you are ready rather than whether you are improving, sit a mock test under the clock.
One last piece of advice that costs nothing. Book only the papers you are genuinely ready to sit. The fee is non-refundable, the five-year clock is already running, and a booked paper you skip spends both.
Directorate General of Civil Aviation. It is the civil aviation regulator of India, under the Ministry of Civil Aviation, and it is the body that licenses pilots and sets and conducts their written examinations.
Five theory papers: Air Navigation, Aviation Meteorology, Air Regulation, Technical General and Technical Specific. CAR Section 7, Series B, Part I is the requirement that lists them. RTR(A), the radio telephony test, is a separate licence and not one of the five.
70 per cent in each paper. Papers are cleared independently, so there is no averaging across subjects, and there is no negative marking, which means a blank answer can only cost you marks.
Five years. Every remaining paper has to be cleared within five years of your first pass, or the earliest passes lapse and have to be sat again. There is no published cap on the number of attempts, so the five-year window is the real constraint.
Four regular sessions a year, roughly quarterly, plus a set of on-demand online sittings spread across the year that are mainly used for re-attempts. The dates change every year, so read them off the Pariksha notice board rather than any copy.