ATO Preview: Helen Heenan on Instructor Standardization at EATS 2026

Ahead of this year's European Aviation Training Summit (3–5 November, Cascais, Portugal), Helen Heenan — Personnel Licensing Policy Specialist at the UK Civil Aviation Authority — will tackle a question every training organization thinks it has already solved: what does it actually mean to have "standardized" instructors?

In a preview conversation with Paul Preidecker, moderator of the ATO track, Heenan explained that the concept isn't new, but the industry's execution of it is often incomplete. Drawing on her own path — from her early days as a CRM trainer to a master's degree in Human Factors in Aviation — she noticed a recurring gap: training materials are often built without a clearly defined purpose. Plenty of slides, plenty of activities, but no sharp answer to "what exactly should this session achieve?"

Most standardization efforts focus on the wrong end of the process. Handing every instructor an identical script or lesson plan tries to standardize the input, but instructors naturally bring different styles, backgrounds, and strengths — and that's not a problem to be engineered away. Instead, Heenan makes the case for standardizing the output: defining crystal-clear, well-built learning objectives so that however an instructor teaches, every trainee arrives at the same measurable result.

Want to learn more? Visit this session during EATS.