Week 6 Sim Session: Levels, pressure, and advisory versus instruction

Number drills, a pressure-setting exercise, and a block where you have to say which sentence type you just heard

31 March 2027

Both teachers are in this one, because the second half needs a controller and a pilot working against each other in a way one person cannot fake.

Your transcript for the week 7 assessment is allocated at the end of this session.

Before you arrive#

Know the three vertical systems and which pressure setting goes with each. The session does not teach that; it drills it.

In the session#

Number ladders, twenty minutes. Levels, altitudes, pressure settings, headings, squawks. Same escalating format as week 2, so you can see whether your week 2 confusions have moved. Several people find that digits are now fine and units are the problem, which is the week’s point arriving on schedule.

Pressure exercise, twenty-five minutes. You fly a descent through the transition layer with a deliberately wrong QNH set and find out how far off you are. Then the same descent with the correct setting. The gap between the two numbers is the whole reason the phrase carries the setting.

Sentence-type block, thirty-five minutes. This is the new thing and it is harder than it sounds.

Halvard transmits; you say what class of message it was before you respond to it. Clearance, instruction, information, or request. Some are deliberately Charkhi Dadri-shaped: traffic information containing a level, delivered at speed, to a room that has spent twenty minutes reading back levels.

Most of the room will act on at least one advisory as though it were an instruction. That is the finding. Having spent the previous block being drilled to read back every number you hear is exactly the priming that makes it happen, and the session is ordered that way on purpose.

If you want to argue that the ordering is entrapment, argue it — it is a fair objection and the honest answer is that the real frequency does the same thing to you and does not warn you either.

Afterwards#

Transcript allocation. One exchange per student, handed out at the end. Different students get different exchanges; you may discuss method, but not content, and the marking assumes you did not.

The classification habit from the last block is the one the assessment leans on hardest. A deviation is easier to see once you have decided what kind of sentence you were owed.