Read the questions, listen once, answer
You'll hear 3 short recordings from air traffic control life — radio exchanges, broadcasts, briefings, conversations and training talks, starting with the shortest. Each one plays once. You see its questions first and can answer while you listen, then have 12 seconds per question after it ends.
How this practice works
- 1Read the setting and the questions, so you know what to listen for. Take as long as you like, then press Play recording. There is no pause, rewind or replay.
- 2The questions stay on screen while it plays — pick answers as you hear them. Listen out for anything that gets corrected or changed.
- 3Answer every question before the timer runs out. Unanswered questions score zero.
- 4At the end you can replay each recording with its transcript and see why each answer is right.
The demo is a shorter taster of 9 questions, with recordings that aren't used in the full test. Use headphones if you can. Keyboard: Tab and the arrow keys move between answers, Enter continues.
About the real test
NATS invites candidates who pass Stage 1 to an online Situational Judgement Test and an online Listening Comprehension test, both proctored with your camera and microphone. NATS doesn't publish the listening test's format, length or pass mark.
Prep providers describe it as testing whether you can understand and retain spoken information that may be given only once, with similar names or numbers, irrelevant detail, sequences and points you have to infer. EUROCONTROL's FEAST battery includes a similar English listening and comprehension test (ELICIT), and AirNav Ireland lists English listening and comprehension among its aptitude tests.
This practice is modelled on that description, not on real test items. Recordings use UK radio phraseology from CAP 413.
Tip: the proctoring listens for noise, so don't repeat numbers out loud as you hear them.
Practice recording & sound check
Not scored · replay allowedA controller gives an instruction to an aircraft and the pilot reads it back.
Read the questions, then play the recording.
Your assessment
Don't go in unprepared.
Aptitude tests reward familiarity: knowing the format and pace of each test before the day lets you spend your attention on the questions themselves.
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Voices are synthetic, generated with Piper from the CSTR VCTK Corpus (CC BY 4.0) and public-domain LibriVox recordings. Callsigns are used for realism; aerodromes, units and waypoints are fictional.