Situational Awareness
CBAT-style practice test · Working memory
Holding a rich tactical picture from one brief exposure: each unit’s type, allegiance, heading and position, plus each controller’s waypoint, altitude and comms channel.
- Skill area
- Working memory
- Length
- 32 questions
- Format
- Timed questions
- Cost
- Free version, or Premium
Free version
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What this test involves
- Eleven pictures, around ten minutes in all. There is no clock cutting you off, the run ends when the eleventh is answered. Turn your sound on: each picture is a spoken briefing you have to memorise.
- Contacts are called out one at a time: as each is spoken it appears on the grid, then the previous one clears. Nothing is ever all on screen at once.
- The grid runs rows A–I, columns 1–9. Units are yellow friendly, red hostile or white unknown, each with a type glyph, heading arrow and callsign.
- Controller aircraft (“Cp”) each carry a side panel that fills over two calls: next waypoint and the time due there, then altitude and comms channel.
- It starts easy, 2 units and 1 controller, and builds to 5 units and 2 controllers by the ninth picture, so the later ones are much heavier and take longer.
- There is a pause after every contact before the next appears, and its length changes each time, so you cannot predict when the next one is coming.
- When the briefing ends the picture clears and one fact is asked. You will not know which, so hold as much as you can. Press 1–4 or click.
How to prepare for Situational Awareness
- Sweep the grid the same way every time and read each controller panel top to bottom, so recall has a fixed order to follow.
- Tie each fact to its callsign as a short phrase, “BRAVO hostile armour north”, rather than memorising columns of attributes.
- The controller panels are often asked and easy to neglect; give them the same attention as the grid.
- The gaps between calls are deliberate. Use each one to fix the contact you just heard before the next arrives.
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