Flying Competent

Every pilot is trained and tested against competencies, TEM, CBTA and EBT. Almost no one explains what they actually mean.

Modern airline training speaks a new language. You're graded on nine competencies, from one to five. Your recurrent check is "evidence-based." Threat and Error Management underpins everything. Yet most pilots are assessed against this framework long before anyone hands them a plain explanation of how it all fits together — or what a check pilot is really looking for.

Flying Competent is that explanation.

Written by a Chief Flight Instructor with twenty-three years on the assessment side of the flight deck — across the Gulf, Europe and beyond — this is the guide for the line pilot, not the training department. It turns a soup of acronyms into a tool you can actually use: to understand how you're judged, to prepare for a competency-based check, to make the step to command, and to keep getting better across a whole career.

In clear, no-nonsense language, you'll find:

•The nine competencies, one by one — what strong and weak actually look like on the flight deck
•Nine real-world accidents — from Eastern 401 to Qantas 32 — that show why each competency matters, and what it changed
•TEM, CBTA and EBT, finally made clear — how they connect, with diagrams and self-checks throughout
•How grading really works — the 1–5 scale, and the truth about what a "3" means
•The instructor's craft — the ORCA assessment process, explained for the first time in plain English
•A quick-reference glossary of every term and acronym

Whether you're a first officer facing your next assessment, a captain shaping a crew, an instructor refining your craft, or a cadet trying to make sense of it all, this book gives you the language — and the confidence — to own your development instead of being surprised by it.

Stop being assessed against a framework you were never taught. Understand it, use it, and fly competent.