What the test is
The formatRoughly ten minutes of multitasking with a short break at the halfway point, running three tasks at once. Figures: quickfire mental arithmetic answered on an on-screen keypad in about four seconds a question. Logistics: watch the circled aircraft and press the matching key as they cross green circles, yellow triangles or red rectangles. Groups: a two-letter callsign flashes up with a beep as aircraft enter and leave, and you get yes/no questions on which are still on screen. The load climbs throughout.
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 Single account✕ Outdated?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 only have to recall the callsigns of aircraft with a circle around them. The uncircled ones carry deliberately similar callsigns to pull you off, so ignore them completely.
This is the most important fix to make to your practice, because some practice apps have you recalling both. They’ll tell you clearly on the day, but if you already know it you won’t be relearning the task while the clock runs.
The aircraft move fast and erratically, and it gets busier as it goes.
Everyone says this. Your timing will feel wrong for the first thirty seconds or so. Expect that and it won’t throw you.
Almost everyone loses the callsigns by the final round. The play that works is to bank the maths and the shapes, then answer callsign questions on gut familiarity.
This is the most consistent advice from people who passed. Several gave up tracking callsigns entirely near the end, guessed on whether one "felt familiar", kept on top of everything else, and still scored well. Don’t burn attention defending the bit that was always going to collapse.
Take your points early. The first 80% is manageable, so go hard at all three task types while you’ve still got spare capacity.
The difficulty ramps up, it doesn’t start high. Points you pick up in the calm phase cost you far less than points you fight for at the end.
The on-screen instructions say you get partial points for “near misses” on shape crossings.
I’ve only seen this reported once. If it’s right, a marginal press beats skipping. Don’t build your whole approach on it though.
FLAG is the only test feeding the central information processing domain, so nothing else on the day can cover for it.
Two candidates confirmed this from their own results pages. Because it stands alone in its domain, a weak FLAG fails you for the role outright no matter how good your total is, and that is exactly what happened to at least one candidate, who missed narrowly and lost all three aircrew roles he wanted. If you only drill one test properly, this is the one.
The shapes are reasonably spread out but not big, so at that aircraft speed you sometimes get almost no window to press. Worst where a track clips the tip of a triangle.
So watch the tips. That’s where presses get missed.
At some point late on it can throw a huge number of aircraft up at once. One candidate counted something like thirty on screen.
He also went to the boarding officer expecting a sheet full of red and found he had done far better than he feared. So treat the spike as the test doing its job rather than as evidence you’ve lost it.
Don’t assume FLAG will show up if you’re sitting a different service’s version. At least one overseas candidate didn’t get it at all.
Their version seems to swap in a different test. There’s more on this further down.
There are two different sounds, one for a circled aircraft joining the screen and one for it leaving.
Learn which is which during the practice run. Treat the sound as a cue to glance at the screen, not something to keep count of.
Practise it on SkyWatch
Our FLAG game runs the three tasks together, the sums, the shapes and the callsigns, so you can practise splitting your attention before the day. There is an Easier board to learn the rules on and a harder one for when it clicks.
A step-by-step tutorial walks through each task on its own before you combine them.
2,300+
practice runs played
on SkyWatch
on SkyWatch
78%
of players who practised 10+ times
improved on their first runs
improved on their first runs
Every SkyWatch game is our own CBAT-style practice version, built from what candidates report. None of them is the real test.
Related tests
- Cognitive Updating Test (CUT)the multitasking test
- Situational Awareness Test (SAT)the grid memory test
- Auditory Capacity Test (ACT)the ball-through-hoops test with radio chatter
- 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.