The planning test hands you a small organisation — a factory, a shop, a hospital, a film studio, a zoo — with seven employees, each with their own workload percentage, and a week of shifts to fill: mornings and afternoons, sometimes evenings too. Beside the grid sits a list of rules: general staffing requirements for every slot, plus personal restrictions — one employee is only available certain days, another must always be supervised, a third can only work full days, a fourth cannot work too many shifts in a row. Your job is to build, within twenty minutes, a schedule that satisfies every rule at once. You start with full marks and every violated rule costs you points, so a plan that is nearly right is measurably better than a plan that is nearly finished.
Why airlines test it
This measures planning and organisational reasoning under multiple simultaneous constraints — the ability to hold a set of rules in mind, see how they interact, and construct a solution that honours all of them rather than optimising one and violating three. It is a different skill from raw logic: syllogisms ask whether a conclusion follows, but planning asks you to build something, and every choice you make narrows what remains possible. Airlines value it because it exposes systematic thinkers — candidates who work constraint by constraint, checking as they go — and separates them from improvisers who fill the grid on instinct and discover the contradictions too late to fix them.
In the cockpit
Flying is planned before it is flown, and every plan is a constraint-satisfaction problem. A route must respect fuel, weather minima, alternate requirements, crew duty limits, curfews and aircraft limitations all at the same time — and when one variable changes in flight, the whole plan must be re-solved without breaking any of the others. Sequencing a descent, working out how to fit a hold, a runway change and a fuel margin together, replanning around a closed airway: pilots who plan systematically stay ahead of the operation, while those who fix one problem at a time create the next one.
For example: an hour from destination the weather drops below minima and you must divert. The nearest alternate has a runway long enough but closes for a curfew in forty minutes; the second is open all night but stretches your fuel to the reserve; the third is comfortable on both counts but takes your crew past their duty limit for the flight home. None of the options is judged on one criterion — you are solving for fuel, weather, runway, curfew and duty time simultaneously, and the right answer is the one that violates nothing. That is the planning grid with the labels changed.
How to practise
The Planning Test below offers ten scenarios, each with its own staff, roles and restrictions. Work the way the test rewards: read every rule before placing anything, start with the most constrained employees — the ones with the fewest legal options — and check the general staffing rules as you fill each day rather than at the end. Twenty minutes is enough for a systematic pass and a verification sweep; it is not enough to untangle a grid built on guesses. Since scoring is per rule satisfied, always submit your best attempt — an imperfect but disciplined schedule still scores. Motion Challenge poses the same construct in Aon's puzzle form (officially motionChallenge): slide the blocking pieces so the orange ball reaches the exit in as few moves as possible, planning the whole sequence before your first move rather than discovering the contradiction halfway through.
The Air France cadet pre-selection puts a planning puzzle seventh in its first stage, and ENAC Marble Tubes is it: two arrangements of the same numbered marbles in three tubes, one above the other, and one number for the answer — the fewest moves that turns the first into the second. Only the top marble of a tube ever moves and the middle tube holds one fewer than the other two, which is where most failed plans die. Finding a route is usually quick; holding the arrangements you pass through on the way is not, and that is what runs out at around seven moves. The Air France course sets it in its stage. The same stage runs a second planning puzzle that looks spatial and is not: ENAC Slid Shapes gives you two grids and a tray of pieces, and you slide the pieces onto your grid until it matches the figure beside it. Sliding only — nothing is ever turned round or turned over — and a light cell of a piece flips the square under it while a dark one leaves it alone. So two light cells on one square cancel out, the order you place the pieces in changes nothing at all, and what you are looking for is a parity, square by square.