What the test is
The formatA white ball inside a first-person tunnel, flown on a joystick and kept centred as the tunnel curves, rises and narrows. Wall contact is penalised in proportion to how long you touch. Coloured shapes appear in the tunnel to be flown through, or avoided when an audio rule says so. Stacked on top: pull the trigger on irregular beeps, change the ball’s displayed number on spoken command with your other hand on the keyboard, hold a spoken 4–6 digit sequence for later recall, and act only on instructions carrying your NATO phonetic callsign. Instructions play once, under deliberate background chatter, and tasks accumulate across rounds without resetting.
Format description from the published CBAT TMI test guides
(rafcbat.wordpress.com) and the Air Defence Academy test guides
(airdefenceacademy.com/testguides).
Skill area: Multitasking.
What candidates say
These points come from people who have sat the test, gathered from forums, community chats and candidates who wrote to us afterwards. Nothing here is quoted or attributed. Each point is graded by how many separate accounts back it up.
✓ Well established! Single account✕ Outdated? From the published guides
You fly a ball through hoops and pull the trigger when told, while the audio throws junk chatter at you along with real instructions for your callsign and fake ones using other callsigns.
The junk is overlapping voices reading filler. The whole discipline is filtering for your own callsign and acting only on that. Anything addressed to another callsign is a trap.
You also have to hold a six digit number, and later on the instructions come with a delay attached.
Twelve seconds in you might be told to change colour to red at fifty-eight seconds. So you’re holding a pending action while still flying and still filtering. Two separate candidates described this independently, which makes it one of the more solid things on this page.
The delay is given as a time on the clock, not as a countdown. You get something like "change your number to 9 at 23:00:30" and it is on you to watch for it.
This matters for how you hold it. A countdown you can feel; a timestamp you have to keep checking against the clock in the corner while doing everything else. Get into the habit of glancing at the clock on a rhythm rather than waiting for the moment to feel close.
Four things get asked of you: fly through or avoid the shapes, hold a code for recall, change your ball’s number and colour, and pull the trigger.
Useful as a checklist because it bounds the problem: nothing else is coming. One candidate reported his instructions being almost entirely about which shapes to avoid, with nothing about colour at all, so the mix you get may be narrower than the full list.
The trigger cue is a loud beep, not a spoken order.
Worth separating in your head from everything else, because it’s the one task that doesn’t come through the voice channel. You can be filtering chatter for your callsign and still have to react to a sound that has nothing to do with any of it.
The background noise is described as sounding like overlapping voices reading filler, or television adverts playing underneath.
It is deliberately the kind of audio your ear wants to follow. Knowing it is meaningless before you sit down makes it much easier to let it wash past instead of half-listening to it in case it matters.
It starts very easy and gets very hard.
Don’t read the opening stages as a sign of how it ends, and don’t let the late difficulty convince you you’ve fallen apart. The ramp is the design.
With a two-word callsign, recent candidates say you respond to either word on its own, not only to the pair said together, and the number of callsigns to listen for grows across the rounds.
Two separate accounts agree on this. Check it against the instructions on the day, because it is exactly the kind of detail that changes.
You type the code in while you are still flying, not at the end of the round.
Several candidates mentioned it. Practise keying with one hand while the other keeps the ball steady.
Practise it on SkyWatch
Our ACT game has you steer a ball through the tunnel while you listen for your callsign, catch the beeps and hold a code.
It works with a joystick if you have one, and with a mouse or touch if you do not. The Real CBAT theme adds the colour and number orders recent candidates describe.
500+
practice runs played
on SkyWatch
on SkyWatch
Every SkyWatch game is our own CBAT-style practice version, built from what candidates report. None of them is the real test.
Related tests
- Figures, Logistics and Groups (FLAG)the one with the triangles
- Cognitive Updating Test (CUT)the multitasking test
- Situational Awareness Test (SAT)the grid memory test
- Colours, Letters and Numbers Test (CLAN)the older sibling of FLAG
Read more
This page is one part of the complete CBAT guide, which also covers how the day runs, the pass marks and the domain minimums. Or see every CBAT test on one page.