Abstract reasoning uses shapes instead of numbers or words. You are shown a set of abstract figures and must either pick the odd one out — the figure that breaks a rule the others share — or choose the option that logically completes a pattern or matrix. There is no vocabulary and no arithmetic, just the raw logic of relationships between visual elements, with distractors kept deliberately close to the answer.
Why airlines test it
Because it uses culture-free, knowledge-free shapes, abstract reasoning is one of the purest measures of fluid intelligence: your ability to solve a novel problem you have never seen before, without leaning on learned facts. Airlines prize this because training and line flying constantly throw up unfamiliar situations, and they want people who can reason through something new rather than only recall a memorised procedure. It is among the best single predictors of how fast you will learn.
In the cockpit
Every abnormal or emergency that is not written in the checklist word-for-word is an abstract-reasoning problem: you have symptoms, a system you understand in principle, and you must deduce what is happening and what to do. Interpreting an unfamiliar failure, making sense of conflicting indications, applying a general principle to a specific new case — that is fluid reasoning in action. Pilots who reason well adapt; those who only pattern-match to memorised cases get stuck when reality does not match the page.
For example: in the cruise you get an amber caution, a slowly falling hydraulic quantity and a flight-control page showing one system degraded — a specific combination not spelled out word-for-word in any single checklist. Reasoning from how the systems interconnect, you deduce a leak in that circuit, anticipate which surfaces and which landing configuration will be affected, and act accordingly. That is fluid reasoning from first principles, not recall of a memorised case.
How to practise
The Non-Verbal Reasoning game below drills all three formats — odd-one-out, complete-the-pattern and rotation-spotting — plus a Mixed run that interleaves them the way mixed non-verbal reasoning tests present them. Because the wrong options are engineered to be near-misses, get into the habit of confirming the rule explicitly before you commit, rather than trusting a first impression. Figural Analogies, Matrix Transformations, Odd One Out and Grid Classification then extend the same inductive skill into the specific formats the cut-e (Aon) assessments use — worth drilling if your target airline screens through Aon. ENAC Figure Matrices is the same reasoning in the French concours' own format: a three-by-three grid with one square missing and eight candidates, one to three rules acting at once along the rows, down the columns or along the diagonal, thirty boards in thirty minutes. Its learn mode explains how to read each board once you have answered it — the fastest way to turn “I felt it was that one” into a rule you can state.
The Air France cadet selection tests this family in its own format, recreated as ENAC Law and Anti-Law: three examples obey a hidden law, three break it, and eight propositions wait below to tick or leave. Two habits decide it. State the law with its quantifier before you tick anything — “exactly one even digit” and “an even digit” are different laws and only one of them is right. And read the group that breaks the law, which is not a second rule but the thing that kills the readings fitting the first three by accident; the review says why each of those three breaks the law. Numbers, words and figures come mixed, so the run also trains the switch between three ways of looking. The Air France course sets it in its day.
