CPaT Eyes More Product Innovation

Houston, Texas-based CPaT Global (CPaT) remains on its 31-year trajectory to advance its portfolio using the latest learning technologies for its current and prospective commercial aviation training customers.

While Power Point presentations, CD-ROMs and other early capabilities are in CPaT’s rear-view mirror, CPaT was the first company to move their learning content entirely cloud based.

Greg Darrow, Vice President of Sales at the company, spoke about CPaT’s portfolio evolution in a wider context, initially explaining while its products have a primary focus on supporting pilot basic and recurrent training, the customer base is expanding. “We have broadened to be more holistic for flight operations training – to include dispatchers, cabin crew, and in some levels, we support maintenance and engineering content. But the major focus has remained pilot training content.”

CPaT’s expanding content for its pilot training products includes aircraft systems and procedural courses, and a vast library of general aviation topics for the wider airline training enterprise. Some representative general course topics include aviation weather, regulatory guidelines and many more.

Projecting Aircraft Numbers – Not Training Audience Members

While CPaT’s customer list includes airlines and airline training organizations, the business model for this provider of distance learning has significantly evolved in the last several years to a structure based on projected aircraft in a fleet.

CPaT has recognized an airline’s major problem in managing training and cost is forecasting the supply and demand signals for its pilots, cabin crew and other corporate team members. With unexpected shifts in nations’ economies, pandemics and other “black swan” events always lurking on the business horizon, CPaT has moved beyond an airline’s projections of employees who will require training to help the customer manage costs. “A much easier question to answer is: how many airplanes will you be flying next year? This is simpler to answer because airplanes are much easier to move in and out of your property. The customer no longer has to worry about having more pilots or less pilots, or pilots unexpectedly retiring because of covid or a geopolitical event. We count the aircraft in a fleet, and adjust your invoice for licenses up and down – while still providing quality, tailored courseware.” Indeed, the industry veteran attributed this change to CPaT’s business model as a primary reason the company has more than 400 current customers – with several more ready to be announced when we spoke this 11 March.

Avoiding Negative Training

Darrow also emphasized CPaT is increasingly striving to achieve the highest level of fidelity in its product portfolio with the goal of avoiding negative training for individuals in the classroom, simulator or other learning venues. To point, the executive noted that initially his teams take the customer’s flight operating manuals and match the airline’s courses to the applicable aircraft configuration. “There is nothing worse than giving someone new to the aircraft something that is generic and then telling them: ‘Ignore what you learned! This is how our airplanes really look and feel.’ We’re well known for pursuing accurate course content. All we provide and focus on is content. We’re not about solving their scheduling problems and other issues. This is what helps makes us an expert, Capt. Darrow said.”

Innovative Product Enhancements

Halldale’s live events and its editorial programs continue to focus on effectively and efficiently training GenZ and other new accessions into the commercial aviation, and adjacent high-risk community organizations. CPaT has heard that clarion call quite well, and is expanding the technology envelope for its products to be more responsive to increasingly younger and tech-savvy learning audiences through two additional strategies.

The executive initially recalled his company has been a leader and innovator “in going mobile and having mobile apps.” Fast forward to today when “everything CPaT does, whether it is aircraft systems courses, procedural courses in a 3-D environment or even general subjects, is completely mobile and offline. That is very, very important to the new, younger learner – being anywhere, anyplace, anytime, and on any device. That is a very big part of our focus.”

CPaT is also attentive on providing its customers’ learners with engaging graphics in their content and making that content interactive. “Page turners” are definitely not CPaT’s target audience. Rather, what the company is striving to deliver is a product that is engaging and “something that the learner can touch and feel in any environment – an aircraft systems course, a procedural course or another.”

Microlessons Strengthening CBTA

CPaT is also empowering the move by much of the commercial aviation training enterprise toward competency-based training and assessment (CBTA). “This is what is happening in the practical world in simulator training and line training, and that is how we want our pilots to operate those aircraft out on the line – with that competency mindset,” Darrow explained.

To increase the ability of pilots to move to CBTA-style learning in their ground-based, recurrent training programs, CPaT is making additional, significant investments to retool all of its courses into microlessons – building blocks to support scenario-based, ground school training. The microlesson learning focus is designed to complement and build upon the current airline and regulatory training strategy to deliver initial training courses using traditional teaching strategies while creating scenario-based recurrent training more reflective of simulator and line training.

Darrow first explained microlessons provide one lesson per learning objective, conforming to a number of pedagogical studies which assert comprehension is much better if delivered in smaller segments rather than large lessons with many learning objectives. “If you give the content to them in microlessons, there are number of benefits: retention increases; I can complete a knowledge assessment instantaneously; I can tie that learning objective to a company policy or regulation so it has a reference, and in future training design I can go and pull every single microlesson that addresses that policy or regulation. This provides a much, much more ‘pinpoint’ ability to learn.”

And here’s another major ROI of providing microlessons – the ability to bundle them into scenarios to closely align the ground-based lesson to a simulator event or scenario.

Conceptually, a student in a ground school-generated, recurrent training scenario, let’s say a flight from Orlando to Houston, could experience a hydraulic problem or other abnormal condition. The use of a microlesson would allow the student to focus on the other-than-normal condition without completing an entire lesson on hydraulics – as is practiced in legacy-era, recurrent training. “This is really revolutionary from my perspective of someone who has flown airplanes for 37 years and sat through a number of very boring ground school recurrent training courses. If I train in ground school as I do in a simulator, my simulator outcomes will also be more positive,” Darrow emphasized.

Empowering the Customer

CPaT Invent permits the customer to make changes themselves to the company’s courseware. “We’re empowering them to not only modify any one of our courses, but create their own microlessons and other content to include in those scenarios,” Darrow said. Use cases for bringing Invent to bear for content include integrating changes to company policies, regulatory rules, aircraft modifications and other developments.

Invent further permits the customer to modify a course’s imagery, narration, text and other content, translate in more than 100 languages, add and delete slides, and complete numerous other actions. “For example, now CPaT has SmartGraphics™ you can pull up, and with a primary control panel on the right [of the screen], you can ‘tell’ the SmartGraphic: this heading, this altitude and this airspeed, and it will modify that graphic for you instantaneously. It will build any aircraft control panel or schematic in any configuration you like – for example, telling it: I want these switches up, these switches down. As a training manager I now have all the assets you must have with these innovative tools!”

During the author’s discussion with Darrow, the topic of an uptick in ground-based aircraft-to-aircraft “touches,” go-arounds and other operational incidents in early 2025 emerged. The executive reflected that it is extremely difficult to teach these events in a traditional ground school, recurrent training session. By using Invent and its SmartGraphics foundation, “This is how you do it,” he added.

Darrow indicated the community will have the opportunity to view Invent, SmartGraphics and other CPaT portfolio products at WATS 2025.

On Our Watch List

CPaT’s is bringing innovation into the commercial aviation training space as it: optimizes innovative learning technologies in its content; empowers its customers’ training staffs; allows pilots to complete CBTA-based courses using microlessons and other strategies and; uses a business model to help airlines better manage and control costs for their training content.

The company’s planned pursuit in 2026 of new business is synchronized with the demands for more effective and efficient training by way of new S&T investments.

We look forward to following CPaT’s quickly-evolving activities.