Widely agreed to be one of the hardest, and one of the few where people report getting partial credit.
What the test is
The formatA grid with columns 0–9 and rows A–J, each cell representing 2 km. Units appear as coloured icons with labels: yellow friendly, red hostile, white unknown. A right-hand panel carries the controller aircraft’s next waypoint, next waypoint time, altitude and comms channel. Information arrives through three unsynchronised channels at once (spoken audio, on-screen text and imagery) and then everything disappears and you answer multiple choice from memory. Grid references are given chess-style, column first then row.
Format description from the published CBAT TMI test guides
(rafcbat.wordpress.com) and the Air Defence Academy test guides
(airdefenceacademy.com/testguides).
SkyWatch Situational Awareness playing itself, our practice
version, not the real test. Play it
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 Single account✕ Outdated?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
Very hard, and there’s not much you can do to prepare beyond general memory technique.
People keep describing it as one of the toughest on the day. They also describe it as good fun, and plenty who found it brutal still passed.
✓ Well establishedExpectation
You get credit for being close on the grid. Positions don’t have to be exact.
This drives the whole strategy below, and it’s why you shouldn’t spend your memory on precise coordinates.
! Single accountScoring
Spend your memory on callsigns, unit numbers and altitudes. Treat grid position as roughly right.
Knowing broadly where something sat is good enough to score. A wrong callsign is just wrong. Some people also track units physically with a finger on the screen.
✓ Well establishedStrategy
Questions go well beyond unit positions. Next waypoint times, altitude, comm level and channel, and direction are all fair game.
The range is deliberately wide, so don’t sink everything into one type of detail. If a value is on screen, assume you can be asked about it.
! Single accountScope
Not every question is multiple choice. One candidate said close to half asked you to type the answer, such as a waypoint time or an altitude.
So aim to hold the exact figure, not a rough sense of it. Where questions were multiple choice, there could be more than four options.
! Single accountTyped answers
Information can arrive one item at a time, a few seconds each, rather than as one full panel to study.
Accounts differ on how heavy it feels. Train on the harder setting and either version will feel manageable.
! Single accountPacing
SAT can decide a role on its own. One candidate cleared the overall mark and still missed a role on this domain alone.
So it isn’t a test to write off as unpreparable. Memory technique and plenty of exposure to the format both help.
! Single accountIt can fail you
Practise it on SkyWatch
Our SAT game shows you the grid, the units and the controller information, then takes it away and asks you about it.
There is an Easier board, a tutorial, and a Real CBAT theme where answers are typed rather than picked, which is closer to what recent candidates describe.
800+
practice runs played on SkyWatch
77%
of players who practised 10+ times improved on their first runs
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.