Week 4 Sim Session: Clearance drills, including the illegal forms

Takeoff and landing clearances at speed, plus deliberate practice at producing the wrong forms so you can hear them

17 March 2027

The first assessment is due at the end of this week, and this session is the last supervised practice before it.

Before you arrive#

Bring your confusion list from week 2 and your hearback catch rate from week 3. The drills are set up so you can work on your own pairs rather than everybody’s.

In the session#

Clean clearances, twenty-five minutes. Takeoff, landing, line up and wait, conditional clearances, cancellations. Both seats. Speed increases until somebody produces the reserved word in the wrong slot, which usually takes about eight minutes.

Wrong on purpose, twenty-five minutes. You will be asked to transmit the illegal forms — POSITION AND HOLD, the ambiguous progress report, a clearance with the runway designator omitted — and the room names what each one risks.

This part surprises people, and it is worth saying why we do it. You cannot reliably detect a form you have never produced. A student who has only ever heard correct phraseology recognises unfamiliar, not wrong, and unfamiliar is exactly what a foreign accent or a busy controller also sounds like. Producing the bad forms yourself is what separates the two.

Assessment clinic, remaining time. Bring your drill recording and we will listen to it with you. Anything you fix in the room still counts; the assessment is about the recording you submit, not about whether you needed help making it.

A note on the ordering#

You may notice this session asks you to say things that next week’s accident killed 583 people through. That ordering is intentional and it is the same argument the lecture makes: the forms are practised as forms this week, so that next week you are not learning a rule and mourning at the same time.

If that ordering sits badly with you, say so in the session. It is a defensible course-design decision and not an obviously correct one, and the objection is worth hearing out loud.

Afterwards#

The readback drills are due Friday at noon. What leaves this session is either a submission you are happy with, or a conversation about an extension — the second is fine and the policies page says how.