EATS 2026 Cabin Crew Preview: From CBTA to the Real Cabin

What happens when a real emergency does not unfold the way cabin crew have been trained for?

From unruly passengers and off-script evacuations to immersive technology and instructor judgement, the Cabin Crew stream at EATS 2026 will focus on closing the gap between the training room and the realities crews face on board, bringing together training managers, chief instructors, instructors, cabin operations managers and representatives from aviation authorities.

For stream moderator Anna Mellberg Karlsson, Cabin Crew Training Manager at SAS Connect, the programme is shaped by the problems airlines are encountering in day-to-day operations.

“The cabin stream really reflects what kind of challenges the airlines and the operators have from year to year,” she said. “It actually mirrors what we are challenged with and how we try to solve it.”

One of those continuing challenges is competency-based training and assessment (CBTA), but the conversation around it has evolved.

When CBTA first appeared on the EATS agenda several years ago, much of the discussion was about understanding what it meant and how airlines could implement it. Now the questions have become more practical: how do airlines train and calibrate instructors? How do they achieve consistency? And how can evidence from operations inform training?

“We are more down really to hands-on: how are they doing it and examples of how it’s been done,” she said.

Training for the Real Cabin

Those questions are particularly visible in The Real Cabin: Evidence, Immersion and the Realities Cabin Crew Actually Face on November 4.

Sophie Cyba of Lufthansa Aviation Training will present findings from D-CEET, a €2.4 million study involving around 300 crew that examined VR-based emergency training.

Kerry Mitchell and Stephen Dargan of Air Tanker will then move from research to application, looking at immersive A330 training, CBTA and digital tools designed to support crew spread across different locations.

Mellberg Karlsson sees their presentation as a continuation of work AirTanker brought to EATS last year. “Now they are showing what they actually have done,” she said.

The session then moves from technology to another operational challenge: disruptive passengers. Jamie Leggett, Fran Scibilia and David Wright of Jet2.com will examine how incident insight, de-escalation and self-defence training can prepare crew for unruly passenger situations.

Beyond Train-the-Trainer

Instructor capability is another major theme.

In Beyond the Certificate on November 5, Juliana Oliveira of CrewPath Academy and Raquel Morgado of Skywings will look beyond Train-the-Trainer certification to explore instructional identity, adult learning and what makes an effective educator.

Olivier Zimmermann and Sofia Pinhão of Global Jet will approach the question from the organisational side, examining standardised assessments, instructor calibration and competency analytics.

It reflects what Mellberg Karlsson sees as one of the more difficult stages of CBTA: ensuring instructors understand the approach and apply it consistently.

She is also interested in the less easily measured qualities involved in instruction and leadership: essentially, how do you know whether someone is actually a good instructor?

When the Checklist Isn't Enough

The stream culminates with Off-Script: When Evacuations Don't Follow the Checklist, led by Raghoonundun “Birdy” Gunputh of Lufthansa Aviation Training.

The workshop asks what happens when an emergency develops in ways that standard procedures cannot fully anticipate. Smoke, unusable exits, passenger behaviour and rapidly changing conditions can require crew to exercise judgement rather than simply execute a rehearsed sequence.

Drawing on lessons from real evacuations, delegates will explore how training can better combine procedures with flexibility, decision-making and crew coordination.

“When the evacuations that we train… don’t follow the checklist, how do we train that?” Mellberg Karlsson said.

And with the workshop closing the Cabin Crew programme, she has some advice for delegates: “I normally say I save the best for last. So the conference delegates should stay until the end.”

From Listening to Doing

The workshop reflects a wider change in this year’s programme. Rather than relying predominantly on conventional speaker sessions, EATS 2026 will feature a much greater proportion of workshops and working sessions.

“It’s more a training than a lecture,” Mellberg Karlsson said.

She believes that format particularly suits a cabin crew audience, many of whom have progressed from operational roles into instruction, training management or cabin operations and are accustomed to exchanging experiences and best practice.

Mellberg Karlsson has been involved with the EATS Cabin Crew stream since its beginnings in 2012 and has watched both the audience and the conversation evolve. Today, discussions have moved beyond establishing cabin crew training as a dedicated discipline to practical questions around competencies, instructor calibration, immersive technology and preparing crews for situations that do not follow the training script.

For Mellberg Karlsson, however, the measure of success remains simple: delegates should leave with something they can actually use.

“At least one thing that we can go, ‘Oh, that was a really good idea. We should try that,’” she said.