Training Chiefs Agree the Real Bottleneck Is Instructors, and Grading Habits Are Part of the Problem

A report from Halldale's Heads of Training Meeting in Bangkok summarises ten Chatham House roundtables covering CBTA and EBT maturity, instructor standardisation, emerging technology, the instructor workforce, regional training capacity and flight-school-airline relations. Asked to name their biggest pipeline risk, participants at different tables gave the same answer: instructors. One table argued that organisations equate instructor standardisation with grading standardisation, even though instructing is a separate skill, and little published material teaches competency-based training itself. A concordance exercise across 85 instructors at one large organisation produced grades from two to five for a single event. The most common complaint was the unexplained middle grade; several organisations independently now require observable behaviour markers at every grade, including three, with one positive and one negative. At one airline a low EBT day-one grade bars a pilot from later becoming an instructor, so pilots reportedly manage the number. Participants suggested AI could help instructors who must track eight to twelve items at once, because the benefit is training data that actually exists. Low-cost fixes included one regulator extending the window for retired pilots to qualify as instructors from three years to seven, and one organisation moving to published instructor competencies and an eight-thousand-report dashboard that showed facilitation was most often missed. The moderator warned that the real danger is rating a programme a four when it is a two.