For decades, assessing a pilot meant checking a list: did the stall, flew the pattern leg, did the engine-out landing — stamp. The method rests on a hidden assumption: that whoever demonstrates the maneuvers on the list is ready for what real flying presents.
Accident data disproved that assumption — the categories that kill the most rarely involve a poorly flown maneuver; they involve decision-making, surprise and management. The industry's answer was to change the question: instead of "did the pilot fly the maneuvers?", "does the pilot demonstrate the competencies that real flying demands?"
That change has a name, an acronym and a document. This post explains how it works under the hood.
CBTA: competency as the unit of training
CBTA — Competency-Based Training and Assessment is structured in the ICAO PANS-TRG (Doc 9868). The central conceptual shift: the unit of training stops being the task ("do a stall") and becomes the competency, defined by observable behaviors.
"Observable" is the word that holds the method up. Competency is not the instructor's impression ("it looked safe to me"): it is a set of behaviors described in advance, which the assessor saw or did not see happen. The same mission can evidence five different competencies, and the same competency can be observed in dozens of contexts.
The nine competencies, one by one
The ICAO framework works with nine. The list is worth reading with attention to the pattern:
- Application of procedures — knowing and executing SOPs and rules in the right situation;
- Communication — clarity and effectiveness inside and outside the cockpit, in and out of standard phraseology;
- Flightpath management — automation — commanding the automation rather than being a passenger of it;
- Flightpath management — manual control — hand-and-foot proficiency, deliberately listed as a competency separate from the previous one;
- Leadership and teamwork — even in single-pilot operations: the team includes the mechanic, the dispatcher and air traffic control;
- Problem solving and decision-making — diagnosis, alternatives and choice under uncertainty;
- Situation awareness — perceiving, understanding and anticipating: aircraft, environment, time and energy;
- Workload management — prioritizing, delegating, sequencing, and recognizing your own saturation;
- Knowledge — the applied technical and regulatory base, incorporated into the framework as a competency in its own right.
The pattern: only two of the nine are "piloting" in the classic sense (the two flightpath managements). The other seven are cognition, judgment and management — because that is where the evidence shows flights are won or lost.
EBT: evidence decides what to train
If CBTA changes how people are trained and assessed, EBT — Evidence-Based Training (Doc 9995) changes what. Instead of repeating the traditional program, the content comes from evidence: accident and incident data, operational reports, studies by aircraft generation. What actually threatens the operation is what goes into training.
In practice, an EBT session has a characteristic architecture:
- Assessment phase: a realistic line scenario, with no memorized script, in which the instructor observes the competencies happening, or not;
- Development phase: training concentrates on exactly the competencies the assessment showed to be weak. The program adapts to the pilot, not the other way around.
It is the most important inversion of the method: traditional training spends time equally on what the pilot has mastered and what the pilot has not. EBT spends time where there is something to gain.
What changes for each role
For the instructor, the job gets harder and nobler: the maneuver checker goes, and in comes the observer who identifies behaviors and runs a debrief in which the person assessed reaches the conclusions — facilitation, not a verdict.
For the pilot, the check ride stops being memorized theater. There is no way to "memorize" a scenario designed to reveal competencies, and a debrief based on observed behaviors is fairer and more useful than a grade.
For the school or operation, the method only works with structured records: each mission assessed by competency, mission after mission, becomes each student's progress curve, and the aggregate becomes management. Which competency holds the class back? Which instructor develops which area best? With instruction performance increasingly measured by indicators, as in ANAC's PQI, this database stops being a methodological luxury and becomes school management.
It is also the link to the rest of the training system: the comparison between what commercial and general aviation do today shows the structural gap, and UPRT is the perfect example of training born from evidence, the direct answer to LOC-I.
How Alis handles this
The Alis flight schools module was built to operate this methodology, not just to accept it:
- Missions with competency assessment: the instructor records observed behaviors per element, in the standard the school defined, in minutes, from the tablet;
- The curve instead of the pile: student progress shows up by competency and by phase — who is stuck, where, and for how many missions;
- FIP signed digitally on the spot: the evidence of instruction is born structured and auditable;
- After graduation, Alis recurrent training brings the same logic — scenario, competency, debrief — to executive and general aviation operations.
A competency methodology without structured records is rhetoric. With records, it is training management — and that is exactly the difference paper will never deliver.
This article is informational. The ICAO documents cited (PANS-TRG Doc 9868 and Doc 9995) and the applicable national regulations should be consulted in their current versions for specific training and instruction requirements.