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Most safety discussions in aviation focus on what happens in the airline or business-aviation environment: procedures, automation policies, flight data monitoring, fatigue risk management, and line training, for example. Yet, the behaviors that underpin all of this — discipline, lookout, workload management, threat and error management, and communication habits — are formed much earlier. They begin in small training airplanes, with students learning how to cope with radio calls, weather, navigation, and aircraft handling while a flight instructor guides them through the chaos of their first hours. How that environment is organized — who teaches, how long they keep the instructing jobs, and how they are supported — is a structural safety factor, even if it rarely appears explicitly in risk registers.
Today, those structural factors are under pressure. CAE’s 2025 Aviation Talent Forecast projects that civil aviation will need around 1.5 million new professionals over the next decade, including approximately 300,000 pilots alongside maintenance technicians, operations specialists, cabin crew, and other support roles, as the global commercial fleet grows from about 33,000 to 44,000 aircraft and the business jet fleet from 23,000 to 27,000.
Boeing’s 2025 Pilot and Technician Outlook, looking over a 20-year horizon, likewise anticipates combined demand for hundreds of thousands of new pilots, maintenance technicians and cabin crew between 2025 and 2044 to sustain expanding airline fleets. These figures are usually discussed in terms of fleet plans, simulator capacity, and recruitment, but far less often through the lens of who is teaching the first lessons — and under what conditions.
In many flight schools, the ab initio instructor is a short-term presence. Many new flight instructors accept their positions primarily to build hours and plan to move on as soon as an airline or business aviation opportunity appears.
This culture brings predictable consequences. Chronic turnover means that training organizations must constantly recruit and qualify new instructors. Students may experience several different teaching styles, sometimes within a single course. The incentives facing instructors are subtle but powerful: When the priority is to move students through the syllabus efficiently while accumulating their own hours, the natural tendency is to “teach to the check ride,” focusing on what will be tested rather than on building a deep, competency-based foundation.
From a safety perspective, this undermines standardization. It is harder to ensure that every student receives consistent messages about stabilized approaches, go-around criteria, automation discipline, or threat and error management when the instructor cohort is unstable. It also weakens the feedback loop between frontline training and the organization’s safety processes. Instructors leave before patterns can be recognized that might involve recurring misunderstandings about crosswind limits, routine tolerance of rushed checklists, or persistent confusion about when to speak up as a junior crewmember, for example.
Airline and business aviation training departments feel the effect further down the pipeline. Valuable simulator hours are often required to remediate fundamentals that should have been shaped in the circuit and during the first instrument flying lessons.
Demographics and System Resilience
Demographic trends magnify this challenge. As retirements and attrition continue, many operators anticipate a significant proportion of their flight decks being staffed within the next decade by relatively junior pilots. This is not inherently unsafe – younger crews can be exceptionally capable – but it reduces the depth of operational experience available within the system.
In that context, the stability and quality of ab initio instruction become even more important. If crews are younger, on average, then more of the “safety capital” of the system must be embedded in their initial training — in how they are introduced to uncertainty, in their attitudes to automation, in their comfort with speaking up, and in their internal thresholds for go/no-go decisions. A high-churn instructor model makes it more difficult to deliver this consistently.
The question, therefore, is not simply how to produce more pilots, technicians, or cabin crew, but also how to ensure that the people who introduce them to aviation are recognized and supported as safety-critical professionals.
One way to reframe ab initio instruction is to redesign the role as a structured pathway rather than a flat, temporary job. Instead of a single category of “flight instructor,” training organizations can establish graded roles: instructor, senior instructor, standardization instructor, and head of training or chief flight instructor. Each role can carry clearly defined safety-related responsibilities.
A senior instructor might mentor new colleagues and handle more complex student cases. A standardization instructor might conduct check flights, observe ground lessons and ensure that key safety messages — such as stabilized approach criteria or unexpected event management — are delivered consistently. The head of training might sit formally on the organization’s safety committee, ensuring that insights from training operations feed directly into hazard identification and risk control.
This is a way of embedding instructional experience into the safety management system (SMS). Instructors who remain long enough to progress into senior and standardization roles are better placed to detect weak signals such as a subtle drift from rigorous preflight planning to “just go and see,” the normalization of late configuration changes, or the tendency of digital-native students to over-trust automation. When those observations are channeled into structured reporting, debrief forums, and safety reviews, ab initio training becomes a living sensor for emerging risk.
Instructors as Safety Practitioners
Structure alone is insufficient. If ab initio instruction is to be treated as a safety-critical profession, instructors need systematic development beyond their initial rating.
A safety-oriented model would include regular observation and coaching, not only on technical flying but also on:
- How to brief threats and mitigations before each flight;
- How to manage student workload without masking real risk;
- How to frame errors as learning opportunities while still enforcing clear limits; and,
- How to introduce automation concepts that will remain valid in more complex cockpit environments.
Classroom sessions can complement line-flying instruction. Topics might include human factors in ab initio training, cognitive load management, introducing non-technical skills at pre-solo level, and designing exercises that elicit decision-making rather than rote reproduction of procedures.
Just as importantly, instructors need to understand competency-based training and assessment and evidence-based training because these frameworks increasingly shape airline and corporate training. If students first encounter the language of “competencies” only when they join an airline, the opportunity to align early training with later expectations is lost. When syllabi for private pilot and commercial pilot licenses and instrument ratings are mapped explicitly to competencies such as communication, workload management, situation awareness, and problem-solving, and instructors are coached to debrief against those behaviors, the transition into airline training becomes more seamless.
The international safety community is beginning to treat workforce issues as integral to safety oversight rather than as separate human resources concerns. A 2024 working paper presented to the International Civil Aviation Organization European and North Atlantic (EUR/NAT) Directors General of Civil Aviation identifies shortages of qualified aviation personnel as a recurring deficiency in national safety oversight systems and calls for more systematic forecasting, planning, and monitoring of the aviation workforce under a revitalized Next Generation of Aviation Professionals program. Although the paper examines the full spectrum of roles — pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance engineers, ground staff, and more — its logic applies directly to ab initio instruction: Without enough capable instructors, no nation can sustainably generate the professionals its system requires.
Regulators therefore have levers that they can apply in the training domain. Approval and oversight of approved training organizations (ATOs) can explicitly consider:
- The experience mix and turnover rates of instructor cadres;
- The presence (or absence) of structured instructional career paths; and,
- How training organizations integrate their activities into national or regional safety programs.
Guidance material can encourage nations to treat ab initio training data such as trends in student performance, recurrent weaknesses in specific maneuvers, or observed attitudes to risk as a useful input into their state safety program, not merely as an internal school matter. Workforce forecasts can distinguish explicitly between overall pilot demand and available instructor capacity, recognizing that the latter is a leading indicator for the former.
Technology as an Enabler
New technologies are often promoted as ways to ease training bottlenecks. Data-enabled debriefing, tablet-based briefing tools, lower-cost simulators, and immersive virtual or augmented reality environments can all add value if used thoughtfully.
However, from a safety standpoint, technology is an amplifier of the instructional system, not a replacement for it. Without a stable, professional instructor corps to select scenarios, set standards, interpret data and debrief meaningfully, there is a risk of creating students who are procedurally fluent in a digital environment but lack robust mental models and judgement in the real world. The decision about when to prioritize a simpler, analogue exercise — for example, a no-gyro circuit on a quiet day — over another high-tech scenario is itself a safety-critical instructional judgement.
Economic realities cannot be ignored. Flight schools and ATOs operate in highly competitive markets with tight margins. Asking them to retain their most capable instructors for longer, redesign career structures, and invest in development without changing the economic equation is unlikely to succeed.
This is an area where partnership can make a difference. Airlines and business aviation operators have a vested interest in the quality of initial training, even if they do not own the schools. Governments and agencies concerned with workforce development also have a stake. Joint schemes could include:
- Tuition support or loan relief linked to a defined period of service as an instructor;
- Co-funded instructor development programs that count toward regulatory requirements; and,
- Recognition by insurers or financiers that robust instructional systems reduce risk, potentially influencing premiums or financing terms.
These mechanisms acknowledge that ab initio instruction delivers value far beyond the flight school’s balance sheet; it underpins the safety performance of the entire sector.
Ab Initio in the Safety Conversation
In many organizations, initial training is treated as external — something that happens at independent schools, beyond the operator’s SMS boundary. Yet the graduates of those schools will later fly under the operator’s air operator certificate, maintain its aircraft, or work its turnarounds and dispatch desks.
One option is to develop more deliberate relationships with key training providers. Operators can:
- Share de-identified safety trends that may be relevant to training (for example, common unstable approach factors or automation management issues);
- Offer occasional guest sessions on line operations, human factors and safety reporting; and,
- Invite input from experienced instructors on the preparedness of new hires and on gaps they observe in early training.
Over time, this kind of dialogue can help both sides align expectations and reduce the disconnect between “how things are taught” and “how things are actually done” in operational contexts.
Not a Stepping Stone
Ultimately, the argument for treating ab initio instruction as a safety-critical profession is about system resilience. The industry is entering a period where traffic growth, fleet expansion, and changing experience profiles will test its ability to maintain safety performance. The easiest part of that system to reshape is the beginning of the pipeline, when habits, attitudes, and mental models are still forming.
If the sector continues to view the ab initio instructor primarily as a time-builder on the way to something else, it will forgo one of its most powerful levers for influencing safety. If, instead, it recognizes instructors as key safety practitioners, provides structured career paths, invests in their development, and integrates their insights into safety systems, it can strengthen the foundation on which all later training rests.
In safety narratives, “basic training” is often mentioned in passing, if at all. It may be time to move it to the foreground — and to see the ab initio instructor not as a transient extra in aviation’s safety story, but as one of its central characters.
Raul Bonadia Rodrigues is an airline transport pilot licensed in the United States and Brazil. He holds a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical science, a postgraduate specialization in aviation safety and continuing airworthiness, and an MBA in leadership, team management, and productivity. He is a certified quality auditor by the American Society for Quality and a Six Sigma Green Belt certified by the International Association for Six Sigma Certification. He is a member evaluator on the technical committees for risk management and quality management at the Brazilian National Standards Organization, which represents Brazil in the International Organization for Standardization.
