EATS 2026 Maintenance Preview: From Conversation to Implementation

How can aviation maintenance train more people, more effectively, without compromising safety?

It is a question running through both the maintenance stream at EATS 2026 and SCOPE — Safety and Compliance Oversight and Professional Exchange — a new two-day workshop, being developed by Halldale and T-C-Alliance, a global aviation training and consultancy network.

Across the conference, discussions will range from competency-based training and assessment (CBTA) and artificial intelligence to digitalisation, VR and training beyond mandatory requirements. The accompanying workshop will take that emphasis on practical implementation further, giving participants the opportunity to work through safety and compliance challenges in greater depth.

For Maintenance stream moderator Claudio Marturano, CEO of T-C-Alliance and a former licensed maintenance engineer, the common thread is moving beyond talking about change to working out how to make it happen.

Two days to take implementation further

Held just prior to EATS, SCOPE is intended to give attendees structured training around some of the challenges they face inside their own organisations. Marturano said the idea grew from discussions about the investment people make in travelling to EATS and how they could gain more from their time at the event.

Rather than simply discussing regulatory change, SCOPE is intended to help participants work through implementation. Marturano gives Part-IS (Information Security), a European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) regulatory framework, as an example. Instead of treating a new requirement as another standalone compliance exercise, the workshop could examine how it can be integrated into existing management systems, how employees should be trained and how organisations can make it work in practice.

“How do you implement it, add it into your existing systems and make it actually functional and safe for your employees and make sure that they understand it and train them on it at the same time?” he said.

SCOPE is aimed at the people responsible for putting change into practice: training managers and trainers, safety and compliance personnel and those implementing change within their organisations.

The workshop will also include a certification element through T-C-Alliance’s accreditation system, drawing where appropriate on accredited partners within its wider network. The intention is that participants leave not simply knowing more, but understanding what they need to do next.

A changing route into maintenance

That focus on practical training reflects Marturano’s own experience. Growing up in Greenock, Scotland, he saw an aviation apprenticeship as an opportunity to enter an industry that could open up the world to him. His four-year apprenticeship was specifically structured around becoming a B1 licensed engineer and included extensive practical experience and mentoring.

There were, he recalls, 20 mentors for eight apprentices. By 21, Marturano was licensed and travelling internationally as a maintenance engineer. He contrasts that relatively clear pathway with the situation facing many aspiring engineers today. Academic and apprenticeship programmes do not always align neatly with Part-66 requirements, meaning young people may complete qualifications but still need additional training towards a maintenance licence.

Marturano says it can take around five years to produce a licensed engineer at a time when the industry is already struggling to attract enough maintenance personnel.

“You can’t tell a kid that it will take five to seven years to become a maintenance engineer and licensed, but it takes nine months to become a pilot,” he said. “It doesn’t compute.”

That workforce challenge provides much of the context for this year’s EATS maintenance stream.

Difficult conversations

This will be Marturano’s third year moderating the stream at EATS. After introducing more panel discussions last year, he found maintenance delegates particularly valued the opportunity to ask difficult questions.

“The maintenance stream is slightly different in that maintenance personnel want to have a bit more nitty-gritty and get into the difficult conversations,” he said.

This year, most sessions will bring four, five or six people together on stage, with delegates again able to submit questions anonymously through the EATS app.

With organisations including Boeing, Airbus, ATR, EASA, professional associations and training providers represented, Marturano sees an unusual opportunity to get different parts of the industry talking to each other.

“It’s the right opportunity to have all the right people in the room at the same time to actually find solutions,” he said.

From time served to competency proven

This will be followed by the session: From Trade to Technician: Building Competency-Based Maintenance Training That Works, which will examine competency-based training across different stages of technician development.

Aristeidis Oikonomou of Olympic Air will discuss a six-month programme bringing assistant technicians into maintenance from adjacent trades. Lydia Kes, René de Moor and Ben Pietersma of MBO College Airport will examine a 20-week competency-based programme, while Emna Touihri, Co-Founder of AERAUT, will explore demonstrating readiness through traceable evidence tied to real tasks.

For Marturano, the value lies in hearing from organisations already implementing CBTA and discussing “what they found worked, what they found didn’t work”.

Artificial intelligence will provide another Day 1 strand. Using AI in Maintenance Training will examine not simply how AI can create content but how that content can be used in learning design, CBTA, regulatory and recurrent training.

T-C-Alliance has itself developed Maestro, an AI tool designed to support the creation of aviation regulatory training content. The project emerged partly from its network of almost 300 subject matter experts and small organisations, some of whom have deep technical expertise but lack the resources to develop training content from scratch.

Beyond mandatory training

Day two turns towards digital implementation and the wider training environment.

CBTA and Digital Implementation: Real Life Case Studies and Panel Discussion will examine how digital training fits into wider management and compliance systems.

“You can’t just do training,” Marturano said. “You have to have a compliance system around it.”

The Missing Factors then moves beyond mandatory requirements to areas including advanced human factors and cross-cultural working. For Marturano, this raises a wider question about employers’ responsibility for developing and retaining their maintenance workforce. Providing the minimum mandatory training is not enough if organisations want engineers to build careers with them.

The final session, Does the Technology Actually Land?, will put technology itself under scrutiny, looking at remote learning, VR adoption and servicing digital twins.

For all the discussion of CBTA, AI, VR and digitalisation, Marturano says the ultimate objective remains much simpler.

“How can we utilise all these systems to make less mistakes?” he said. “How to make less occurrences, how to keep people safe.”