Enhancing Pilot Readiness in a Changing Aviation Landscape
The first quarter of 2025 has started with several notable accidents globally. Within the first two months of 2025, three plane crashes occurred in the United States – these incidents highlight a concerning trend in aviation safety and the resultant fatality risk for industry.
Fatality risk, as defined by IATA, is the likelihood of a person perishing in an accident per million flights. This provides a standardised metric to assess and compare safety performance across the aviation industry.
The fatality risk has shown a general improvement over the past five years with 2023 reaching a record low of 0.03 due to one fatal accident resulting in 72 fatalities. In 2024, seven fatal accidents, totalling 244 onboard fatalities increased the risk to 0.06.
2025 has already seen 78 fatalities within the first 90 days of the year – a stark increase, but still well below statistics in previous decades.
The aviation community is actively investigating these events to identify underlying causes and has attributed possible causal factors to ATC shortages, increased air traffic, airspace congestion, pilot shortages, low experience levels as well as supply chain disruptions and financial constraints on maintenance and equipment. Simply put – the demand is exceeding the capacity and, possibly, the capability of the industry.
The industry faces a significant global pilot shortage, with projections indicating a persistent gap between pilot supply and demand. In 2022, Oliver Wyman projected that the aviation industry could face a shortage of nearly 80,000 pilots by 2032, with demand outpacing supply in most regions. In South Africa, airlines continue to grapple with high attrition rates, with some losing up to 20% of their crew complement to international carriers annually.

This industry-wide pilot shortage has compelled airlines to accelerate training programmes and hire less experienced pilots. Airlines report gaps in skill sets and insufficient baseline knowledge among new recruits, especially when transitioning from propellor-driven aircraft or single crew operations into the multi-crew jet environment.
This underscores the urgent need to rethink pilot training models to develop crew adaptability to ensure a seamless and safe transition into airline operations.
Human Factors in Aviation Safety
Traditionally, pilots built experience over time before joining airline operations. However, today’s market demands low-hour pilots to transition directly into structured airline environments. This has created a competency gap, where pilots lack essential multi-crew cooperation, structured decision-making, and threat management skills, before joining an airline.
In a multi-crew airline environment, the combination of low-time crew members grappling to find their footing coupled with an overburdened pilot picking up the load (so to speak), could potentially set the scene for an error-chain with fatal consequences. It is a widely-accepted that humans, when under pressure, make mistakes.
Despite the improvements in aviation safety over the years, human error remains a leading cause of accidents. ICAO and many other industry bodies attribute human factors as contributing to over 70% of accidents. Understanding why humans make mistakes and identifying the most common human errors is crucial to enhancing aviation safety.
In order to solve a problem, one must first understand it – Aristotle
Pilot error is often categorised into active and latent errors (Reason, 1990). While active errors are immediate mistakes (such as misreading an instrument), latent errors are systemic and often result from inadequate training, cockpit design issues, or regulatory oversights (Shappell & Wiegmann, 2000). These errors may remain dormant until they contribute to a critical situation. Rapid onboarding, as a result of the pilot shortage and skills attrition, can result in inadequate preparedness for complex flight situations, thereby increasing the likelihood of errors, incidents and accidents.
To mitigate these risks, human factors training must start earlier in a pilot’s career, rather than being introduced only later at the airline level. Research consistently highlights that human errors related to situational awareness, decision-making, overconfidence, complacency, and risk management, contribute significantly to aviation accidents (Craig, 2001).
Gordon Dupont’s ‘Dirty Dozen’ outlines 12 key human factor elements that contribute to aviation errors, ranging from crew resource management concerns (communication, teamwork, situational awareness) to cognitive influences (fatigue, distraction and stress). Add in pressure, a lack of knowledge and resources and the industry finds itself in a precarious position.
In the airline sector, IATA’s human factors strategy emphasises skills development on aspects such as communication, situational awareness, decision-making, teamwork, leadership, adaptability, and workload management—skills that should be reinforced throughout all stages of training.
Why Airline Training Models Shouldn’t Start in the Airline – Enhancing Training to Build Resilience
A competency-based, outcomes-driven training approach is critical to addressing these challenges. Airlines currently utilise Scenario-Based Training (SBT), Line-Oriented Flight Training (LOFT), and Threat and Error Management (TEM) to improve crew performance and enhance decision-making. However, these concepts must be integrated earlier into the flight training process.
Industry recommendations include an improved use of simulation in training with an evidence-based approach to CRM Elements.
Flight simulators expose pilots to high-risk scenarios without real-world consequences. SBT immerses pilots in realistic scenarios that require adaptive decision-making – a skill that can be specified and measured. Research shows that pilots trained in SBT demonstrate superior performance under stress (Fletcher et al., 2016). Progressive simulator training, including a focus on the cognitive skills during normal and abnormal flight scenarios, is an affordable yet impactful solution.
In conjunction with flight training (whether aircraft or simulator based), CRM training should begin at ab-initio level to reinforce communication, threat and error management (TEM), decision making, problem-solving and workload management. This is particularly important when training individuals younger than 25, as the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for executive functions, only fully matures in the mid-to-late 20s. Individuals with a developing prefrontal cortex may struggle with decision-making, stress regulation and workload management – all critical cognitive skills for safe crew performance.
Simulated high-stress decision making scenarios can be used to enhance pre-frontal adaptability, while CRM, TEM and structured decision-making models should be integrated into ab-initio to compensate for the developing brain. In addition, stress-regulation techniques should be introduced to support workload demands.
The 32 cognitive skills that build pilot resilience
A 2003 study conducted by the University of South Australia identified 32 human factor skills that flight crew should demonstrate to effectively manage errors through avoidance, detection, and response measures.
These specific measurable and observable skills were categorised into two primary dimensions – Cognitive, and Interpersonal Skills.
Cognitive Skills include Information Management (Efficiently collecting, processing, and utilising relevant data during flight operations), Planning and Mental Simulation (Anticipating potential scenarios and preparing appropriate responses through mental rehearsal) and Monitoring and Evaluation (Continuously observing flight parameters and assessing situations to identify deviations or emerging threats). Team and Interpersonal Skills include communication and task management.
The study emphasizes that integrating these competencies into training programmes can significantly improve flight safety by equipping crews with the necessary tools to manage errors effectively.
Shifting the Baseline
To achieve this, flight schools, airlines and industry must collaborate in expanding CRM and TEM training at the ab-initio level while enhancing simulation-based training to focus on real-world challenges. To effectively prevent errors, pilots must be trained to develop cognitive competencies that align with ICAO’s CBTA (Competency-Based Training and Assessment) model which include situational awareness, decision-making and problem-solving, pattern recognition, workload management, memory and procedural recall and cognitive adaptability.
These principles are widely used in airline environments, but they must also be adapted for general aviation and ab-initio training. This can be achieved by:
1. Making use of Pre-Flight Briefings
Introduce and make use of formal pre-flight crew briefings to include structured Threat and Error assessments such as PAVE (Pilot, Aircraft, enVironment, External Pressures) and IMSAFE (Illness, Medication, Stress, Alcohol, Fatigue, Emotion) in order to identify threats, errors and potential undesirable aircraft states that could occur.
2. Objectively assess situational awareness
Endsley’s Model of 1995 requires a three-tiered process of situational awareness – the ability to detect a hazard, the ability to perceive or understand the nature of the hazard and, the ability to project the impact and consequences of the hazard in addition to possible mitigation strategies.
This can be objectively assessed by asking: Has the pilot detected the hazard? Does the pilot understand the nature of the hazard? Can the pilot project the potential outcomes and risk of this hazard? Has the pilot / Can the pilot formulate a mitigation strategy? Can the pilot recognise patterns and common risk factors, such as weather deterioration or ATC congestion?
3. Include structured decision-making models
Models such as DECIDE (Detect, Estimate, Choose, Identify, Do, Evaluate) and FORDEC (Facts, Options, Risks, Decision, Execution, Check) should be applied in flight scenarios as early as possible during ab-initio training in order to normalise and support cognitive function and task loading in the crew member.
4. Reinforce error avoidance, detection and response behaviour
Educate the pilot and emphasise the cognitive skills required for Information Management, Planning and Mental Simulation, Monitoring and Evaluation as well as the interpersonal skills identified for crew resilience.
A New Training Paradigm for a Resilient Industry
Human factors remain a critical challenge in aviation, but by evolving training methodologies, the industry can significantly reduce pilot error, enhance safety culture, and support a sustainable aviation workforce. The aviation industry cannot rely solely on increasing pilot numbers to solve the pilot shortage—it must also develop better-prepared pilots. By introducing airline-level human factors concepts earlier and shifting to competency-based training, we can enhance pilot resilience, improve safety, and create a more robust pipeline of airline-ready aviators.
For more information, or assistance in training development, reach out to Infinite Aviation. Visit: https://infiniteaviation.co.za/home/
hello@infiniteaviation.co.za +27 61 097 7088