According to the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), over 88% of all chartered plane crashes and over 50% of commercial airline crashes can be attributed to pilot error. At first glance, these numbers appear incredibly high, however, when considering the overall decline in air accidents over the last fifteen years, the overall trend is actually improving. Why? To a large extent thanks to greater consideration being given to a pilot’s competencies and not just their proficiency. That is why from 1 January 2023 ICAO introduced changes to the Dangerous Goods training program, making it mandatory to follow a CBTA approach.
It is clear that Competency-Based Training Assessments (CBTAs) are playing an ever-increasing role in ICAO compliant flight training courses such as ours. But what are CBTA programs and how are we implementing them? To best answer these questions, let’s first take a look at the “C” in “CBTA” to “get us off the ground”:
What are competencies? Pilot core competencies are defined by ICAO Doc 9995 as a standard set of skills and abilities that a pilot should possess to ensure safe, efficient, and comfortable flight operation. Being a pilot is a responsibility for people’s lives and operating aircraft, that is why these technical and non-technical competencies should be mastered to the highest level and then deeply assessed. ICAO identify 8 core competencies:
The 8 core competencies can be assessed using a range of “behavioral indicators”. But is that actually the case? Let’s look at how traditional training compares with competency-based training to see how they go about assessing a trainee’s competencies:
We can see that Competency-Based Training and Assessment (CBTA) is an approach to training that assesses individuals based on their demonstrated ability to perform specific tasks and meet the desired performance outcomes that are relevant to the jobs they will be doing. A common criticism of traditional training meanwhile, is that it addresses the proficiency of a pilot, but unlike CBTA, does not necessarily enable individuals to reach their highest level of operational capability in both foreseeable and unforeseeable scenarios.
To implement CBTA effectively, we developed our new Dangerous Goods course in accordance with the core CBTA principles. In our new Dangerous Goods (No Carry) course, we implemented CBTA following the ADDIE model:
Continuous improvement is one of the cornerstones of CBTA – it applies both to trainees and the programs that are used to train them. At Evionica, we are always exploring ways in which we can improve and how we can improve the training experience. Let us know how you use Competency-based Training Assessments in your courses, and let’s improve aviation together!