Welcome to a special podcast series brought to you by Simaero. I'm Bryan Roseveare. If you work in aviation training today, you can't escape the acronym CBTA, Competency Based Training and Assessment. It's arguably the most significant shift in how we train pilots in the last 30 years,. But for many airlines and instructors, it remains a buzzword, theoretical, complex, and sometimes frankly confusing. Our goal with this series is to move from buzzword to blueprint. We're going to break down exactly what CBTA is and how to implement it without breaking your training culture.
Joining me to navigate this complex landscape is Cédric Coffignal. Cédric is Simaero's Training Manager for France and our Subject Matter Expert on all things CBTA and EBT. Cédric, welcome to our studio. Thank you, Brian. It's fantastic to have you here. I'm thrilled to have you here because, as I said in that little introduction, the CBTA talk that's been going around the industry for a long time, and has, I suppose, created a lot of confusion amongst a lot of pilots, a lot of trainees, a lot of airlines. when you explained it to me, it was the first time I actually really ever understood it. So that was starting point of this podcast. It really is great to have you here. But before we dive into the the regulations and philosophy, I'd love for the listeners to get to know you. Could you share a bit about your background in aviation and what led you to specialize in this specific field of training?
SpeakerSo thank you, Bryan, for receiving me. I'm very happy to be with you. I was born in aviation. My father was a aircraft mechanics, my grandfather was a pilot in the French Air Force. So naturally, I chose an aviation career. I started my career in the French Air Force. have been a Synthetic Flight Instructor in the French Air Force for about 10 years. After 10 years ,I left the French Air Force. I joined different French ATOs, Approved Training Organization, first as CTKI, Chief Theoretical Knowledge Instructor. Then, I joined Airbus, irst as CTKI of one of their flight school, and then I handled the position of worldwide CTKI for Airbus and Deputy Head of Training and Subject Matter Expert for CBTA and EBT in Airbus. And I had the chance to meet and join the Simaero t eam eight months ago, right now.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's fantastic. I 'm thrilled to have you on our team and also just listening to you speak there. It also just opens a lot about how many avenues there you can actually go down. I was also born into an aviation family, and we sort of ended up in the same place, but with very different routes to get here, which is which is kind of cool in many ways, you know. My dad was the charter side and I got into the airlines and then have found my way into training, and it's very interesting how that can actually happen. But yeah, fantastic to have you here. And let's jump into it. I suppose is keen to cut the academic language.
Cédric, if you had to explain the CBTA to a non-pilot CEO, how would you do it?
SpeakerSo, first we need to understand the current training philosophy, okay, which is also known as legacy training. Right now, we are going to make a difference between legacy training, which is the current training philosophy, with CBTA training, which is the new training paradigm. The current training philosophy is purely based on task repetition, meaning we are doing exercise one time, two times, three times, etc. etc. So it's based on task repetition. However, the problem is that modern aircraft become more and more complex as well as as well as the environment inside which a pilot is evolving. Despite this increasing complexity, history has shown us that accident is still possible. That's why I will summarize the current training philosophy trying to train pilot on an infinite number of tasks, because we are training them again and again, so that they are ultimately only able to manage a finite number of in-flight situations. This is the current philosophy. The concept of CBTA is totally the opposite. Meaning this is a new training philosophy, and this training philosophy is no longer based on task repetition. This training philosophy is based on a finite number of pilot competencies. T here has been determined nine different pilot competencies. If I come back to your question, if I had to summarize the CBTA philosophy to non-pilot CEO, I would say very simple, this is trying to train pilot on a finite number of competencies in order for them to be able to manage an infinite number of situations in flight.
Speaker 1Okay. Make sense. So there's a focus towards the competencies instead of looking the framework and like you the repetition. Some pilot gets something wrong, you do it again, you do it again, until such time they get it right. So a totally new philosophy.
In saying that, we've been assessing airmanship as an example for decades. Why is CBTA different from what a good instructor has always done intuitively? Look, I know there are good instructors and there's some average ones, but haven't we doing this anyway?
SpeakerYou're absolutely right, Brian. Good instructors have been intuitively assessing airmanship for decades. But first, it doesn't apply to all instructors. And this framework of airmanship is a very subjective framework. Currently, in the regulation, there is no official definition of what is airmanship, how to it, how to assess it. Compared to this airmanship assessment, CBTA is a much more comprehensive structure and above all, objective philosophy and system. Meaning today, thanks to this tool, it will permit to give to our instructor clear objectivity and legitimity to assess what they called in the previous world airmanship, saying, okay, right now it's no longer only a story physical skills piloting an aircraft, it's also a question of behavior. And thanks to the CBTA system, you will have an entire framework and entire legitimity and objectivity to say to a pilot you are not competent, not due to the fact that you are not able to fly your aircraft, but because you are not able to manage the crew, you are not able to manage the situation, etc. So I think for this kind of instructor, the transition to CBTA will be for them, I would say just they will be happy to do this because they say, okay, right now you are giving me all the tools I need from day one, and for which sometimes I was blamed because, okay, you assess airmanship, but it's not the goal of the training. We want to be able for them to manage a situation of failure. We will see airmanship later.
Speaker 1Yeah, I totally understand. Is there a um can I look at it this way? So I was with a uh previous airline for just over 10 years. We had very good training. We had a lot of instructors that did actually come from the military, and a lot of what I instruct today from is from what I learned. I had to take all the good things that I learned and uh put them into my own little toolbox, and I use that for training that I do. If you take something like airmanship now, it sounds very much to me airmanship is so broad, are we assessing airmanship over the whole session, or does this sort of lead its way into a slightly different thinking where depending on what task we might be trying to achieve in the sim, that airmanship could be looked at differently. If you're dealing with a complex item, uh, or are you dealing with your cabin crew in a uh pre-departure briefing, you know, that there's there's different ways to look at this.
SpeakerYeah. Uh this is, I think it's clear clearly the power of the CBTA, meaning Airmatch is included in everything in CBTA. Um, in all MAT is included in all different competencies, meaning that today we have to understand that tasks still exist in CBTA world. They will never remove tasks because as soon as you are doing something in a cockpit, you are doing a task. But the task will become a tool in order to demonstrate the competence. Okay, meaning that in the end, um as soon as I'm doing something, you give me the opportunity to demonstrate my competence, whatever the situation. And this competence airmanship has included inside whatever I do. There is no specific airmanship for this task. Okay, this is uh um behavior that I have to demonstrate whatever the situation. Then after, depending on a very speak specific situation, expectation can be slightly different, meaning that you have a, I would say, a translation of this behavior because it's generic behavior. So in this case of situation with this aircraft, this crew, etc. etc., the translation of this behavior is this one. But however, we don't focus, we will no longer focus on the task. I will focus on the behavior inside which I will find some notion of airmanship.
Okay, right. So we'll have time on the podcast to go through. And this is going to be a series, so we're gonna have multiple episodes talking about this subject. So we'll have time to go into the real detail of it, but just to get a good understanding at the start, for those pilots that are listening and instructors. Currently, if this morning, if I had a training session , you know, let's say I gave the crew a steep turn to do, I would then write on their form how the steep turn was good, bad, what they need to do to correct it, and they would leave the session or the debriefing with knowledge of a specific task, say as an example, that steep turn. Are they still going to leave the debrief with a bit of a how-to guide on how to do a steep turn, or is it going to be simply focused on those behavioral markers and those competencies we spoke about?
SpeakerWell, I think we will have the opportunity to go deeper during our next podcast episode. But if I want to answer very quickly to your question, right now, again, we will no longer focus on the task, we'll focus on the competencies, meaning that the debriefing will be purely focused on competencies. Why? Very simple. If I don't perform my steep turn correctly, it's not related exactly to the same task. Because if it's to say, okay, you don't maintain your straight and level flight during the steep turn, you don't maintain the straight level flight during the approach, you don't maintain straight and level all the time around, you are focusing on task, but the problem is not necessarily the exercise itself. It could be a lot of different things, it could be a problem of critical skills, it could be a problem of monitoring. So by tackling directly the root cause, okay, it's a problem of monitoring, you will correct all the errors done during all the exercises, meaning that in this case, the trainee, the pilot, will no longer focus on the steep turn, but the pilot will focus on, okay, I know that I have to monitor, because if I don't monitor properly, I will lose altitude, whatever the task I'm doing, if it's a steep turn or if it's an approach.
Speaker 1Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So the problem is not so much the steep turn, it's the monitoring, as you say. And that's applicable then to other tasks that you go and achieve. Also, it gives a bit of direction, I think, to the instructor afterwards to know what to focus on. Seems much clearer. Sometimes it's quite difficult, particularly if you have really competent crew, you think, well, what am I actually going to debrief
these guys on? Because I can't add a lot of input. And other times, you start thinking, well, how am I going to fit this into less than a two-hour debrief? Because there might be too many things that you have to. So I like the direction that it's going there. We'll hold that there and we'll go in a deeper to that later on. I hear a lot of things. I hear CBTA, I hear EBT Evidence-Based Training, I hear instructors talking about KSA. How do these all fit together? W here's the unity here with these?
SpeakerTaxonomy is always a sensitive subject in aeronautics, and especially when we talk about CBTA. Simply, CBTA is the general philosophy, the overall concept, the general umbrella. It's the training paradigm. Now, the application of this concept in different training areas can be described with a specific word. So, for example, EBT, Evidence-Based Training, is nothing more than CBTA applied to the traditional recurrent training and checking system. That's all. Another example I can give you is in EASA, several years ago, they have what they call 100KSA, which is the application of CBTA in theoretical classroom training. So it's just a question of application of the CBTA concept in a specific domain. And for some other areas, like for instance type rating, there is no specific name. This is why, right now, you can hear CBTA type rating. This is because they don't define a specific name for CBTA applied to a type ratin. So this the specificity. Finally, to answer your question about KSA, so Knowledge, Skills, and Attitude, it's a quite simple answer. Nine competencies have been defined by ICAO and regulator. Each of these competencies has been associated with a specific number of Observable Behaviors. And the definition of an observable behavior is a combination of knowledge, skills, and attitude. Why this shift? Assessing knowledge is something very easy. Okay, you can do a rating test, oral assessment, whatever you want. It's easy. Assessing skills can be more difficult because you have different kind of skills. So physiological skills, psychomotor are relatively easy to assess. Okay, it's just do a task, maintain your strength and level it. It's purely physical skills. Cognitive skills, it becomes more and more complex to assess cognitive skills, but it's not impossible. The last level is the metacognitive skills, and meta cognitive are very, very difficult to assess. And on top of this, you have the attitude. Attitude is for sure possible to assess, but it's impossible to assess objectively. Why? Because attitude depends on your cultures, your experience, your area, your domain, everything. So that's why they say, okay, we can no longer make the difference between knowledge, skills, and attitude. So if we want to be objective, we need to find a solution. And what is objective when we assess a pilot? What we can do? And the answer was okay, observe something. We observe behavior. So we are going to define behavior, and we are sure that this behavior is a combination of knowledge, skills, and attitude. Which portion? I don't know. And I don't care. But it's necessary combination of these three. But by observing this behavior, I can have an objective assessment of the associated competence.
Speaker 1Now, being at Simaero here, I speak to a lot of airlines, a lot of instructors, and everyone's got their own understanding about what they're doing. And some will even say, yes, we are doing CBTA training. And the way they explain it to me is they've maybe chosen one element out of those three that I gave you, and they're doing that one particular element. Is that possible? Or is CBTA an all-encompassing thing? You either do it all or you stick to legacy training? In other words, can you just do EBT and leave everything else as it was?
SpeakerYes, you can choose to make the jump, and we will see later for sure. I think it will become the challenge of the future. But you cannot mix EBT and legacy training, they are incompatible due to the first answer I gave you between the training philosophies, which are totally opposite.
It makes a lot of sense. As you can see, I wasn't lying when I he knows what he's talking when he speaks about CBTA training. Is the shift being driven by the regulators, like the EASA, our Civil Aviation Authority here in South Africa, ICAO because of safety data, or is it just modernization for the sake of it? I have told so many times to friends outside of the aviation industry that airline operations is the safest industry in the world. If this was and still is the case, then why the change? And I say that with real sincerity. I think aviation, you being in it for a long time, we kind of get immune to how incredible this industry actually is, and pilots coming in for simulator training every six months and maintaining a standard, trying to improve the standard. Why do we need this change?
SpeakerYes, it is indeed certain that this change, is desired by regulator, EASA, ICAO, but also other major players in aviation industry, like the main one I'm thinking about is IATA, aims to improve safety worldwide. As I mentioned earlier, we now work in an increasingly more complex environment with even more modern machines which are themselves becoming more and more complex from a technical point of view. So the goal here is therefore to further improve safety in the face of these new challenges, as safety must remain the number one of all aviation operations. So, however, this improvement in safety must be implemented globally at worldwide level and at all stages of the aviation industry, meaning airlines owning an AOC, Approved Training Organizations, maintenance training, but also air traffic controller . So to achieve this, the key element is the collection and analysis of data. Okay, if you want to improve safety level, you need first to collect data. But this is the issue. This data is worthless if we don't all speak the same language. I f I need a translator to analyze the data from one operator to another one, in the end you can't be 100% sure you will lose the reliability of the data. the goal, one of the goals of the CBTA through the improved of flight safety, is to create an universal framework, an international framework for all the stakeholders in order for them to speak the same language and share the same data at a worldwide level in order to have this global safety improvement.
Speaker 1Now you mentioned IATA there. Is IATA a key player in all of this? Because if you're gonna just rely on the regulators, and look, the regulators they have a difficult job because they're also trying to promote aviation in that particular region. But, you don't have think too far outside the box to realize in Africa we have different issues to what you may have at a EASA in Europe. So is this where IATA sort of comes in and is able to provide a nice clear framework for what the standard is going to be based on to improve safety? And to me, exactly what you said, that's a very nice, clear mandate to work with. We're trying to improve safety, but it needs to be based on data. So IATA gonna play a bigger role in this going forward, no doubt.
SpeakerYes, for sure. IATA is one of the main, not only IATA, I think we will discuss about it later on, but IATA is one of the main key drivers for the implementation of CBTA and EBT in the world, because they are regrouping almost 90% of the different airlines in the world. So they are able to collect all the needs of all airlines coming from every part of the world, including Africa, in order to push this new training philosophy wherever we want.
I've got a couple other questions here, but I'm gonna try and piece a couple of these together for you. So take your time to think about this one, but I think that might give the pilots and instructors a nice understanding here. If we just go back to old legacy-based training and to sort of explain to people that maybe haven't been through an airline before and or done recurrent training before. Basically what you have is you have a course that the Civil Aviation Authority would put together, and in that course will be a whole bunch of tasks, and you would be required to demonstrate those tasks to the instructor in the simulator environment. And we mentioned something like a steep turn earlier on. So let's take something else. Let's take a standard V1 engine failure exercise, which to me incorporates quite a few things because you've got to fly the airplane accurately, you have to fall back on your procedures. We always say to the guys, you know, when you're dealing with something difficult like that, we don't rise to the occasion, we fall back on our procedures, our training. So a standard little exercise like that, which involves rolling down the runway, the instructor, at the decision speed, will fail an engine. The decision beyond V1, of course, is to continue the takeoff, and then we watch how the crew member performs this exercise. we continue the climb to about 2,000 feet, we see how it was, if it was good, we put the aircraft back on the ground and we go and do another one. Now, very simply at the moment, we can have a look at that exercise and say, Yep, that was good. That's a three or a four, or not so good, it was a two. And if it was a two, then we say, All right, this is what was wrong. Maybe your procedure was incorrect, or you know, very simply, maybe the monitoring pilot forgot to call positive climb, and then the flying pilot didn't call for gear up, which resulted in a very poor exercise. So now, no doubt something like a V1 engine as an exercise will still be included in a CBTA package. Okay, explain the difference to me again one more time, using a V1 cut as an example as opposed to the steep turn we did earlier on.
SpeakerOkay, first I will revert the question for you. Imagine you are doing the exercise, you're an instructor doing CBTA, and your assessment about this specific engine failure before, after everyone is okay, it was quite good, but in terms of, I don't know, communication, because currently, due to the fact you are a CBTA instructor, you are speaking in terms of competency and not and no longer in terms of task. Okay, in terms of communication, it was not so good. This is an area of improvement. So it could be better. Let's redo the exercise. Your crew redo the exercise, and in this case, the exercise is performed well. The question for you is okay, are you sure that if you put the crew in another situation, they will know they will do it effectively in the same communication competence. Because when you perform the exercise, if you reperform you r the exercise, you are asking them to redo the same task so they will apply directly the correction you mentioned in exactly the same context. And this is where CBTA solves a lot of problems compared to the old tick box legacy training system. The first is official recognition of all non-technical competences. It includes leadership teamwork, situational awareness, problem solving, decision making, communications, and workload management. But these dimensions are completely absent from the legacy system, except when we speak about CRM. But again, right now, the CRM is fully embedded in the CBTA philosophy. So once again, we have just given to the instructor a legitimate and objective framework for training and evaluation, and especially on non-technical competencies. The second problem that CBTA will solve is directly related to the first one, clear and systematic integration of threat and error management. Why? Simply by the definition of the pilot competencies, which are presented as a countermeasure to threat and error. What does it mean? In this way, tasks, as I told you previously, are now a tool for demonstrating a competence which in turn demonstrate a pilot's ability to manage a threat and error and thus generate flight safety quite simply. So therefore, I don't care about the number of tasks performed. No, I don't care whether the pilot was able to manage every possible or inimagable situation. Okay. I observe and assess their ability to react to a threat or, as a human, they are allowed to do error. In CBTA, the error is totally normal because we are not machine, we are human. So behind this is okay, I do an error, I detect, and I correct the error. And necessary, the training principle is this one if I am able to detect and correct my error, I'm demonstrating competence.
Speaker 1Yeah.
SpeakerMeaning that whatever the situation, if it's not a V1 engine failure after takeoff, if I have an engine failure during the approach, I will have to manage the same competencies. So in the end, I come back on my first definition, train on a finite number of competencies in order to be able to manage an infinite number of situations.
Speaker 1I like it. I like it even more from the instructor side because it provides the structure with a bit more direction. I saw something in the simulator the other day. I've seen it a couple of times, but it was more sort of visible this time. There was a a crew member that wasn't particularly good on the communication side, just naturally a quieter person, didn't speak much. Excellent pilot. I mean, handling skills, top, a very, very good pilot. But the one
exercise that we did in the simulator was a windshear short final approach, and it was identified, and the pilot decided to execute a go-around. So he didn't call windshear, he actually - this was before the aircraft you know shouting windshear. So he did everything he was supposed to do, but he didn't announce what was happening. And the young pilot that he was flying with, he hasn't for quite a while, but also a very low-time hour pilot. He assumed that the captain was actually executing a normal go-round. So he went down to give him - it was on the ERJ so he was at flap 45 to flap 9. But the flying pilot didn't want the flaps retracted because it was a windshear scenario and wanted to keep the configuration of the aircraft the same. And they ended up having a little bit of an argument once they had got the aircraft away from the ground. But I actually took the side of the young first officer there because it wasn't announced what was happening. So it boiled down to the communication there could have been better. I wasn't looking at it from a CBTA perspective, but it was pretty obvious that this was a sort of breakdown in communication. And then I suppose thinking back, if I had to go back on that whole training session, I think communication would have popped up quite a few more times.
SpeakerExactly. And this is also where I think that the system is very powerful because thanks to this system and a specific pillar of this system that we will discuss in the next episode, which is the course design, we are going to give to the instructors all the keys they need in order to really work on this, meaning that, in your example, if this kind of weakness or area of improvement is identified by the instructor, they will have at their disposal a set tasks. Whatever the task. Again, the task is just a tool right now. Just in order to say, okay, if I do this task, I'm sure if I ask them to do the exercise, I'm sure this exercise needs to mobilize this competence. So that's why this is that way they called in EBT, this is ITT, Individual Tailored Training. This is the same principle. I have a list of exercises in order to specifically work on a specific competence. And again, I emphasize on the competence and not on a task.
Speaker 1And this, I suppose, is where the gathering of evidence comes in. You need to see what's happening there before you can actually tailor that session. Al right, fantastic.
Now, one last question for you in this episode. We're gonna carry on speaking about it in the next few episodes, so don't worry. Is this a nice to have, Cédric, or are the regulators saying this is the direction this is going, to become a mandatory standard? Are we gonna end up in a situation where the whole world is trying to now quickly comply with CBTA because it's now, you know, been given a hard deadline, or are there still a few more doors open here?
SpeakerYes, currently nothing is mandatory regarding implementation of CBTA. It is true that some precise regulatory framework has been defined and published by numerous authorities like EASA and other National Civil Aviation Authorities concerning the implementation of EBT. But still, EBT is, even if the regulatory framework exists, EBT is not mandatory at all. So even though none of this is mandatory, given the safety implication, the majority of regulators and the majority of key players in aviation industry are pushing very, very hard for its implementation and use. For example, look at the number of white papers published by IATA from 2020 about CBTA, EBT implementation. They publish different CBTA implementation, consolidated CBTA implementation manual, etc. Airbus, for instance, as an OEM, is also strongly advocating for this. And we know from reliable sources that, right now, EASA is preparing a new regulatory framework for implementation of CBTA within Approved Training Organizations. So I would therefore say that all these signs clearly show that the CBTA is not at all considered as a nice to have by the regulators, but rather as a future international standard that will become essential and serve as a benchmark of aviation. But from a personal point of view, and again, it's purely personal, I think that this is simply due to the fact that CBTA is very complex to understand, implement, is very time consuming at every stage of the aviation industry, meaning even by the regulator, by the stakeholder of an airline, by the stakeholder of an approved training organization. This is for this reason that the timing is not mandatory. But I think it's a question of time in order for the industry to be fully ready for this, and maybe it will become mandatory at the time.
Speaker 1Well, if we're gonna stick to the aviation philosophy, if we know something is safer and we don't adopt that strategy, then we are no longer gonna be the safest industry in the world. So we have a lot to be proud about in aviation. And I'm actually really looking forward to the change. I'm really looking for if you can provide instructors with more tools, you can give the the crew members more information after a session, it's gonna make a massive, massive difference.
Look, I think that's a perfect place to pause now. We've established that CBTA isn't just a new label for old training, it's a fundamental philosophy shift from ticking boxes to building resilience. Cédric, thank you for laying the foundation. In our next episode, we're going to open the hood and look at the mechanics. We'll be discussing the three pillars of CBTA, specifically the course design, teaching, and assessment, and how they must evolve together to make this all work. I'm Bryan Roseveare This is Simaero. We'll see you in episode two. Thank you, Bryan.