The sim assessment

The single most useful thing to understand before you walk in is that the operator is not trying to find out whether you can fly an ILS. They already know roughly what your licence and your hours mean. What they cannot read off your CV is what happens to you when the workload rises: whether you keep talking, whether you keep scanning, whether you notice that you have stopped noticing things.

That is why the profile is often flown in an aircraft you have never touched, with a briefing that gives you the numbers rather than expecting you to know them. Being unfamiliar is the point. An assessor watching an experienced pilot fly a familiar type learns almost nothing; watching anybody fly something new, with a hand on the thrust levers and somebody in the right seat, tells them what they came to find out.

It follows that the recoverable errors are not the ones that hurt you. A heading that wanders five degrees and comes back is a normal day. A heading that wanders five degrees while you say nothing, followed by a second thing you also do not mention, is the pattern that ends assessments.

The detail varies by operator, but the shape is consistent enough to prepare against. You arrive, you are briefed, you fly, and you are debriefed. The whole thing is usually shorter than candidates expect and the flying part is often the shortest piece of it.

Two parts of the day are routinely underprepared. The first is the briefing: you will be given speeds, a profile and a set of expectations in a short space of time, and how you receive that is itself observed. Writing it down, reading it back, and asking one clear question about the part you are unsure of reads far better than nodding.

The second is whoever is in the other seat. On many assessments that is another candidate. How you work with a stranger under pressure is a large part of what is being looked at, and treating them as competition rather than as crew is visible from the observer's seat within about two minutes.

Most operators mark a sim assessment against the same competency framework they use for everything else, so the categories are the ones in the competency room of this product: how you manage the flight path by hand and through the automation, how you communicate, how you lead and follow, how you solve problems and decide, how you keep track of the situation, and how you manage your workload.

What changes in a sim is which of those become visible. Workload management and situation awareness are hard to evidence in an interview answer and impossible to hide in a simulator: the moment you have more to do than time to do it, your priorities are on display.

The behaviour assessors most consistently reward is verbalising. Saying what you see, what you are about to do, and what you want from the other seat costs you nothing when things are calm and is the single thing that most often stops a small problem compounding when they are not.

Exact profiles vary and any operator can ask for something not on this list, so treat it as the common ground rather than as a syllabus. What these exercises share is that they are all flown at an unremarkable standard by a prepared candidate and badly by an unprepared one, and the difference is almost never natural ability.

A go-around asks you to change your mind, change the aircraft's configuration and change your plan at the same moment, at low level, having just spent several minutes committing to the opposite. Candidates who have not rehearsed it lose the pitch attitude while looking for the thrust levers, or get the thrust and the attitude right and forget to ask for anything from the other seat.

Rehearse it as three things happening in a fixed order rather than as one manoeuvre: the attitude, the thrust, and then the calls. Get the nose to the target attitude and the thrust up before anything else, and only then start asking for configuration changes and talking to the controller. The order is what makes it repeatable when you are surprised.

Then rehearse the version that matters more: the go-around you initiate yourself because the approach is not working, rather than the one the assessor tells you to fly. Deciding to stop an approach that has gone wrong is a much stronger thing to be seen doing than salvaging one.

Paid sim hours before an assessment help, and plenty of candidates succeed without them. What they buy is familiarity with the specific device, and that is worth less than the three things below, all of which you can do at a table.

Chair flying is the first. Sit down, close your eyes, and fly the profile in real time, out loud, including the calls. Real time matters: running it through in your head in thirty seconds teaches you the sequence and not the pacing, and pacing is what falls apart under pressure.

The second is your scan. Decide in advance where your eyes go and in what order, and practise it against any instrument display you can find, including a picture. A scan you have thought about beforehand degrades gracefully; one you are inventing on the day does not.

The third is your standard calls. Know what you will say at a thousand feet, at stabilisation, at minima, and at a go-around. These are the sentences that keep coming out of your mouth while the rest of your attention is busy, and having them ready is what buys that attention.

You will usually be asked how you thought it went before you are told. This is not politeness. A pilot who can identify their own errors accurately is a pilot who can be trained, and a pilot whose self-assessment does not match what the assessor watched is a much harder problem for an operator than one who flew imperfectly.

Answer it specifically. Name the two things that went wrong, say what you think caused each, and say what you would do differently. Then stop. Candidates who list eight faults are not showing insight, they are showing they cannot prioritise, and it is the same failure the sim was watching for.

If you genuinely thought something went well, say so. Accuracy runs both ways, and a candidate who cannot name anything they did competently is not being modest, they are being inaccurate.