Training Culture Is Not a Checkbox

Based on the presentation Do You Really Have a Training Culture? By Captain Trevor Jensen, Aviation Consultant, Avlaw Consulting

Safety is our number one priority. It is a phrase that surfaces reliably in the aftermath of aviation incidents — issued from boardrooms, repeated in press statements, and taught to new recruits as a defining principle of the industry. Captain Trevor Jensen, Aviation Consultant at Avlaw Consulting, has heard it many times. He does not find it reassuring.

His argument, presented at the recent WATS conference, is that aviation's relationship with safety culture — and specifically with training culture — is built on a foundation of comfortable illusions. Approved training syllabuses, human factors modules, instructor qualifications, recurrent training schedules: these are controls, not evidence of culture. The distinction matters enormously, and most organizations are not making it.

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Jensen's provocation is simple but pointed. If you want to know whether your organization genuinely has a training culture, stop looking at what is on the schedule and start asking what is actually changing as a result.

Compliance Is the Floor, Not the Ceiling

The regulatory framework that governs aviation training is, by design, a minimum standard. Regulators work from established documentation. Their job is to verify that boxes are ticked against a set of requirements — many of which, Jensen notes, reflect the realities of an industry that looked very different in 1971 than it does today.

The problem is that when training is designed primarily to satisfy regulatory oversight, it tends to deliver generic content on a fixed schedule, measure attendance rather than competency, and repeat itself year after year without meaningful adaptation. Jensen recalls early safety and emergency procedures training at Qantas — then regarded as one of the safest airlines in the world — as exercises in endurance rather than learning. Pass the exam, return in twelve months, repeat.

This is not a training culture. It is a training schedule, and the gap between the two is where safety risk lives. When training is reduced to a compliance obligation or treated as a scheduled disruption to operations, it signals something deeper: an organization that has not genuinely committed to learning as a strategic function.

What a Real Training Culture Requires

Jensen's framing of training culture positions it as a competency and safety enabler — not a subset of regulatory compliance, but the mechanism through which safety data and just culture disclosures are converted into actual behavioral change on the line. Without that conversion, he argues, safety culture remains theoretical.

The practical implications are significant. Competency-based and evidence-based training approaches — CBT and EBT — align most closely with what Jensen describes as genuine training culture. They focus on real-world performance rather than classroom attendance, on demonstrated capability rather than qualification status. The distinction between the two matters: qualification does not equal competency.

Jensen cites research on defibrillator use as a striking illustration. After approximately nine months without practice, a significant proportion of trained personnel — including medical professionals — are unable to operate a defibrillator correctly. Skill decay is real, and it is not unique to aviation. The implication for cabin crew training, where crews may interact with emergency equipment infrequently between recurrent cycles, is direct.

The further implication is that organizations need to rethink how they maintain crew engagement and competency between formal training contacts. Annual or recurrent center visits represent a small fraction of a crew member's working year. Jensen points to internal podcasting as one practical tool — a rapid, controlled mechanism for circulating operational lessons following significant events, reaching crews in the rhythm of their daily lives rather than waiting for the next scheduled training day.

Train for Today's Threats, Not Yesterday's

One of Jensen's sharpest observations concerns the mismatch between training content and operational reality. Aviation training programs continue to allocate significant time to scenarios — open-water ditching exercises, for example — that represent an extremely low-probability threat in the contemporary operating environment. Meanwhile, the threats that cabin crew encounter daily receive comparatively little structured training attention.

Unruly passenger management is one. Lithium battery fires are another. In 2024, available data suggested an average of approximately two flights per week experiencing thermal runaway events — a frequency that places it firmly in the category of foreseeable operational risk rather than edge-case scenario. And yet training investment in this area remains limited relative to actual exposure.

Jensen is equally skeptical of well-intentioned but poorly considered responses to these threats. Brief physical intervention training for cabin crew, he argues, is more likely to result

in crew injury than effective incident management. Cabin crew are recruited for their interpersonal capability, not their physical capability. Training should build on what they actually do well.

The Just Culture Connection

A training culture cannot function without psychological safety, and psychological safety requires just culture. Jensen is direct about how far many organizations fall short of this standard. An Asian airline he works with responded to a door slide deployment by identifying the crew member responsible and terminating their employment. The investigation was closed. The lessons — a complex chain of miscommunication involving crew members from three different nationalities, a non-English-speaking loader, and a door that should not have been armed — were never extracted.

This is precisely the failure mode Jensen is describing. When organizations respond to incidents with blame rather than inquiry, they lose the data that training culture depends on. The two root causes that appear most consistently in accident and incident investigations are lack of competency and lack of training. If an organization genuinely had a training culture, Jensen argues, those root causes would not keep appearing.

The fix requires organizations to create environments where crew members can report honestly, debrief openly, and acknowledge mistakes without fear of penalty. It also requires listening to the people who actually do the job. Cabin crew handle an evolving operational environment on every sector — different passengers, different conditions, different challenges. They accumulate knowledge that never reaches the training centre because no one has built a systematic way to capture it.

The organizations that genuinely have a training culture are the ones asking hard questions and building systems that can honestly answer them. The rest are doing compliance. The difference, in the end, shows up in the data — and in the incidents that never make it into the data because a well-trained crew member handled them before they became reportable.

Jensen is moderating the Cabin Crew stream at the upcoming Asia Pacific Aviation Training Summit (APATS), taking place from 31 August - 2 September.