Train-the-Trainer by DataHomeLab

A4.1.3 Evidence

A comprehensive analysis of safety data sources and training results has demonstrated important differences in training needs between different manoeuvres and different aircraft generations. Availability of such data has both established the need for the EBT effort and supported the definition of the resulting training concept and curriculum.

What the evidence argument claims

Two claims, both load-bearing for the rest of the programme:

  1. Training needs vary with the manoeuvre and with the aircraft generation. A training programme that treats every manoeuvre as equally important, or that treats every aircraft generation as having the same human-performance issues, ignores the operational reality. The aircraft-generation taxonomy in the ICAO-9995 appendices encodes this variation explicitly: what crews struggle with on a fly-by-wire fourth-generation jet is not what they struggle with on a first-generation jet, and the manoeuvre matrices in those appendices reflect that. A single fixed training catalogue applied across generations would over-train some areas and under-train others.
  2. The data both motivated EBT and shaped its curriculum. The evidence base did two things: it established the need for an evidence-based approach (the case that the legacy event-based curriculum was no longer fit for purpose), and it supplied the content that the new approach would teach (the operational threats and competency gaps the curriculum should address). The same data set serves both functions.

Sources of the evidence

The handbook does not enumerate the data sources by name, but the ICAO-9995 manual that anchors the programme draws on the same evidence pool the EBT community uses globally:

  • Line Operations Safety Audit (LOSA): structured observation of normal line operations under just-culture protections; surfaces the threats, errors, and undesired aircraft states that line crews actually encounter and how they manage them.
  • Flight Data Analysis (FDA) (also called Flight Data Monitoring, FDM): routine analysis of recorded flight parameters to identify exceedances, trends, and operational risk indicators.
  • Accident and serious-incident analysis: investigation reports from national safety boards (NTSB, AAIB, BFU, BEA) and the worldwide accident dataset maintained by manufacturers and industry bodies; the IATA EBT working group used this dataset to identify the threats and errors that drove the design of the EBT programme.
  • Training records: results from existing recurrent training programmes, identifying which manoeuvres crews routinely struggle with and which competency areas show the largest variance between crews.
  • Safety reports: ASR (Air Safety Report), MOR (Mandatory Occurrence Report), and confidential reporting (CHIRP, ASRS) data from line operations.

The aggregated evidence pool is what allows the EBT curriculum to claim it is responsive to actual operational risk rather than to a designer's intuition about what crews should practise.

Connections

  • A4.1.2 General Principles. The aim statement whose final clause ("based on evidence collected in operations and training") this section unpacks.
  • A4.1.4 Operators EBT Programs. The regulatory anchors that codify the evidence-based approach into programme requirements.
  • A4.1.6 Competencies. The competency set the evidence base supports.
  • EBT. The methodology built on this evidence argument.
  • Six aircraft generations. The generation taxonomy that encodes the manoeuvre-by-generation variation the evidence demonstrated.
  • ICAO-9995. The standards-body source whose appendices reproduce the evidence-derived manoeuvre and scenario detail per generation.
  • Threat and error management. The frame the evidence sources (LOSA in particular) operationalise.