Tracking tests are live control tasks, not puzzles, and this family covers every flavour of the skill. The Path Following Test is the COMPASS-style slalom: steer a dot along a winding track from start to finish without straying off the line. The Compensatory Tracking Test hides the disturbance — you see only your error from centre, and must null it continuously. The Pursuit Tracking Test has you chase a target that accelerates and changes direction. The Drift Control Test hands you an unstable system that falls away the instant you stop correcting. And the Gate Flying and Tunnel Flying Tests add control lag: the aircraft responds late, so you must fly where it is going, not where it is. Finally, two composite tests load the control loop itself: the Dual-Task Tracking Test runs two loops at once — hands chasing one target while your feet hold another — and the Instrument Coordination Test has you hold heading, altitude and speed on their bugs while answering a spoken number task that never pauses.
Why airlines test it
All of these measure continuous psychomotor control, but each isolates a different half of the craft: precision on a defined path, disturbance rejection, pursuit, stabilisation of an unstable system, and — hardest of all — anticipation through lag, the defining feel of a real aircraft, which never responds instantly. Assessments run several of them because together they map your control quality: whether your inputs are small, early and smooth or large, late and oscillating, and how quickly your motor control learns and refines with practice — which is exactly what flight training will demand of it. The composite tests probe the last ingredient: whether that control quality survives when a second loop or an audio stream competes for your attention — the time-sharing no single-loop test can measure.
In the cockpit
Flying is full of 'follow the line' precision: tracking a localiser and glideslope down to minimums, holding an ILS needle centred, staying on a taxiway centreline, flying an exact ground track in a crosswind, keeping altitude and heading within tight tolerances. And every real aircraft adds the lag these tests simulate — a jet responds seconds after the input, so pilots who chase with big, late corrections end up oscillating, while those who anticipate stay smooth. Small, early, anticipatory inputs over coarse ones: that is the entire craft, in every one of these tasks.
For example: flying a hand-flown ILS in wind, you keep the localiser and glideslope needles crossed in the centre with tiny, anticipatory corrections — easing off the drift before the needle actually moves, not after it has already run away from you. Chase the needles with big, late inputs and the approach becomes a string of overshoots in both axes; the light, look-ahead touch these tests build is what keeps it smooth and stable all the way down to minimums.
How to practise
Start with the Path Following Test — its route repeats every round, so your improvement is directly measurable — and favour smooth, gentle stick movements, looking ahead to where the path is going rather than reacting late. Add the Compensatory and Pursuit Tracking Tests to train error-nulling and target-chasing separately, and the Drift Control Test to build the millisecond recovery an unstable system demands. Save the Gate Flying and Tunnel Flying Tests for last: with lag in the loop, they reward planning your line a gate or two ahead and correcting early and gently — the closest a screen gets to the feel of a real aircraft. Once the single loops feel comfortable, finish with the composite tests — Dual-Task Tracking, then Instrument Coordination — which ask you to keep that control quality while a second loop and an audio stream compete for it: tracking that holds together under divided attention, not raw tracking alone, is what the hardest batteries are really probing. A game controller is strongly recommended throughout.
The ENAC EPL concours sets a four-task dual-stick test — gauges, cross tracking, letters and mental calc under imposed priority weights — recreated as ENAC Psychomoteur. The ENAC Test Preparation course walks through its phases and the red-bar rule. Air France cadets sit that same four-task test at the second stage — and a different one of the same name at the first: three tasks on the keyboard alone, with no stick, in ENAC Three-Task Keyboard Multitask. Hold the arrow the circle is travelling on, press space when two symbols match, press f when the marked equation is false. The exercise averages its three scores in equal thirds, so the circle — the one with a ceiling you cannot beat — is the wrong place to spend attention. The Air France course sets both in their stages.