What the test is
The formatThree components running at once. Colours: red, yellow and green dots travel horizontally toward colour-coded zones and you press the matching key at the moment of contact. Letters: a 4–6 letter sequence shows for about five seconds, then vanishes, and you pick it out of four scrambled options in the screen corners. Numbers: rapid arithmetic typed in before the timer moves on, with no review state and no way back to a previous answer.
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 Single account✕ Outdated?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
If you’re sitting the current RAF CBAT, you almost certainly get FLAG instead of CLAN. Nobody sitting the RAF version reports getting CLAN.
Graded red because practising CLAN for an RAF CBAT looks like wasted effort. It also explains a common source of confusion: some practice apps carry CLAN and others FLAG, and people compare scores across them without realising they’re preparing for different tests. SkyWatch has both, so pick the one your battery uses.
✕ OutdatedProbably not your test
At least one overseas candidate sat CLAN and got no FLAG at all, and a New Zealand candidate reported CLAN still being in their battery.
An Australian candidate was told by the psychologist running their testing that the same software is used by the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and that each military picks its own tests from it, so CLAN versus FLAG is a choice each service makes. So if you’re applying outside the RAF, don’t assume the FLAG advice higher up this page applies to you. Ask what your battery contains before you plan around it. The Royal Navy has gone the other way and moved to FLAG, so a Navy guidance document still showing CLAN is worth checking rather than trusting.
! Single accountStill live overseas
It’s coloured diamonds, maths and remembering codes, structurally very close to FLAG.
Which is good news if you’ve been drilling FLAG and then find out you’re sitting this. The three concurrent tasks map across almost one for one, and the same advice applies: bank the maths, don’t defend the memory task to the death.
! Single accountFormat
Practise it on SkyWatch
Our CLAN game runs the three tasks together: the coloured dots, the letter strings and the sums. There is an Easier board and a choice of keyboard layouts.
A slow-motion tutorial lets you learn the keys before the speed picks up.
Practise CLAN free
Every SkyWatch game is our own CBAT-style practice version, built from what candidates report. None of them is the real test.