Technical Skills Fly the Plane - Human Skills Save Lives

At EATS 2025, aviation psychologist Aleksandra Kapela delivered a compelling argument that aviation safety is shaped far more by human skills than by technical perfection. Speaking to a packed room of instructors, airline leaders, and training providers, she urged the industry to rethink long-held assumptions about what makes pilots safe, competent, and resilient.

Kapela began by revisiting three of the most striking emergencies in modern aviation: Qantas 32, Cathay Pacific 780, and Southwest 1380. All three flights suffered severe technical failures that, on paper, left little margin for survival. Yet in each case, the crews managed to stabilise the situation and land safely.

What united these flights, she argued, was not miracle or luck, but human performance under extreme pressure.

She quoted Captain Richard de Crespigny describing his mindset during the Qantas 32 crisis: “I wasn’t the best pilot in terms of flying technique… but I was calm. My brain was juggling three layers of chaos, but I knew I couldn’t let that leak into the cockpit.” That composure, Kapela noted, anchored the entire crew as they handled hundreds of system messages and a rapidly deteriorating aircraft.

Cathay Pacific 780 and Southwest 1380 offered equally powerful examples. In both cases, the technical situation was far from perfect. The crews made mistakes along the way, and the scenarios fell outside the boundaries of checklist procedures. But they succeeded because they communicated clearly, leaned on shared situational awareness, stayed ahead of the aircraft, and managed their emotions in a way that preserved clarity and teamwork.

“These flights were not perfect,” Kapela told the audience. “But they were successful because of non-technical skills: communication, leadership, monitoring, adaptability, and calmness.”

Despite this, she observed, aviation still refers to these skills as “soft.” Kapela pushed back strongly against the term, describing these competencies as “hardwired into safety” and “the glue in the multicrew operations.” They bridge the gap between what procedures say and what the real situation demands. They determine whether two pilots build a shared mental model or drift into quiet parallel thinking.

She described familiar cockpit scenarios: a captain who avoids delegating out of fear of appearing unsure; a first officer who stays silent after a previously dismissed suggestion; a pair of experienced pilots who remain overly polite while a situation quietly escalates. These situations, she emphasised, are not only training issues. They are also selection issues - symptoms of how the industry has historically overemphasised technical ability and overlooked behaviour.

Kapela described this systemic oversight as the competency trap. For decades, she said, aviation believed that more procedures, more checklists, and more technical drilling would eliminate errors. The unintended consequence was a generation of pilots trained to value correctness over adaptability, box-ticking over critical thinking, and compliance over communication.

“We confused technical correctness with operational competence,” she said. “And they are not the same thing.”

To underline the point, she presented data from Europe, the United States, and EASA-aligned operators. A 2020 study of CPL and MPL programs found that most training failures were rooted not in poor flying technique, but in communication breakdowns, weak leadership, low engagement, and teamwork challenges. American Airlines’ own operational analysis reached a similar conclusion: what goes well in the cockpit is driven mostly by monitoring, teamwork, and mutual support rather than technical brilliance. Studies from Turkey and other European contexts echoed the trend, highlighting situational awareness and decision-making as the strongest predictors of pilot success.

Across regions, the message is consistent: behavioural gaps - not technical gaps - pose the greatest obstacle in pilot development.

Kapela then turned to CBTA, arguing that the “A” - assessment - is both the heart of the framework and the most misunderstood. Competencies do not exist only during annual checks, she said, but in every briefing, every debrief, every scenario, every conversation in the cockpit. For CBTA to work, instructors must understand their own behavioural strengths and blind spots as clearly as they understand those of their trainees.

She added that CBTA is not only about instructors assessing pilots, but also about both pilots and instructors understanding their own behavioural tendencies. This is why structured self-assessment tools are essential: they give individuals an honest, data-driven picture of how they communicate, lead, monitor, and make decisions - long before anyone else evaluates them. When both sides work from the same objective framework, assessment becomes a shared language rather than a guessing game.

To help bridge this gap, Kapela introduced Symbiotics’ Crew Resource Management Assessment, a scenario-based, role-specific psychometric that evaluates cooperation, leadership, situational awareness, and decision-making using structured, realistic dilemmas.

Each domain is broken into observable behaviours such as workload sharing, proactive planning, inviting crew input, or anticipating changes. The tool produces both a behavioural preference profile for the pilot and a structured report for the operator/instructor - enabling consistent, repeatable assessment across training stages. The versions are tailored to both FO and Captain’s desirable behaviours, as on different levels, different patterns might be advantageous or expected.

Kapela illustrated its value with a striking comparison: two upgrade candidates may perform similarly in the simulator, but differ dramatically in behavioural patterns. One may communicate poorly, avoid conflict, or fail to anticipate unfolding events; the other may collaborate, seek input, and keep the crew aligned. Technically, they look identical. Operationally, they do not.

“Who would you rather have in the left seat at 3 a.m. in bad weather?” she asked the audience.

As her session drew to a close, Kapela offered a clear call to action: non-technical skills must no longer be treated as secondary, optional, or supplementary. They must shape selection, training, assessment, and daily operations.

The industry, she argued, must stop selecting for compliance and hoping it will turn into competence. Instead, it must measure the behaviours that define real-world performance, especially under uncertainty.

She ended with the message that stayed with the audience long after the room emptied:

“Technical skills may fly the plane. But human skills bring it home.”

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