Thai Airways COO Calls for Training That Prepares Pilots for the Unpredictable

Pilot training must develop the judgement and resilience crews need when a problem continues beyond the end of the checklist, Thai Airways’ Captain Chawan Ratanawaraha told APATS 2026.

Opening the symposium in Bangkok, the airline’s Chief of Operations used his keynote, “Resilience Training & Airmanship: Preparing for the Unpredictable,” to argue that training needs to prepare pilots not only for known failures, but for situations that do not fit neatly within established procedures.

His message was simple: “The checklist ended… but the problem remained.”

Captain Chawan illustrated the point with an experience from his early career flying the MD-11. During recurrent simulator training, he faced an all-engine flameout shortly after take-off. He completed the memory items and checklist, attempted a restart and, when the engines did not recover, began preparing for a forced landing.

The instructor stopped the simulator and asked why he had not tried restarting the engines again.

Captain Chawan replied that the checklist had not told him to.

It took him years, he said, to understand that the instructor was teaching something more fundamental than another procedure: the determination to keep thinking about what else could be done to save the aircraft.

That ability to exercise judgement beyond procedure was the central theme of the keynote.

Captain Chawan pointed to a Boeing 747 hydraulic failure in which pilots tried a solution outside the expected checklist sequence and were able to extend the landing gear, as well as the DHL Airbus A300 struck by a missile over Baghdad in 2003. After losing hydraulic flight controls, the DHL crew used differential engine thrust to control the aircraft and return to Baghdad. Both examples feature in his presentation as demonstrations of “airmanship in action” and judgement beyond procedure.

The challenge for the training community, he said, is how to develop pilots capable of responding in the same way when confronted with combinations of failures they have never previously encountered.

That challenge is becoming more pressing as the aviation operating environment grows more complex. Captain Chawan highlighted geopolitical conflict and airspace disruption, jamming of signals from GNSS satellites like GPS, Galileo, increasingly interconnected aircraft systems and AI, and rapid Asia-Pacific aviation growth and workforce change as reasons why resilience matters now.

GNSS interference provides a particularly useful example. A crew may recognise that navigation information has become unreliable, but modern aircraft depend on interconnected systems and shared data. Pilots therefore need to ask what else may have been affected, which information remains trustworthy and how that failure could interact with weather, workload or another technical malfunction.

In such circumstances, crews may find themselves dealing with a combination of problems that has never been presented in a simulator and is not captured by a single checklist.

Captain Chawan stressed that resilience does not mean abandoning procedures or encouraging undisciplined improvisation. Rather, it means developing pilots who understand when compliance is sufficient and who retain the knowledge, judgement and discipline to continue making safe decisions when it is not.

His presentation identified five capabilities of resilient pilots: aircraft understanding, prioritisation, decision-making under uncertainty, crew coordination and recovery thinking.

Aircraft understanding, he argued, remains fundamental even as technology becomes more sophisticated. Pilots need sufficient technical knowledge to understand how systems interact and enough manual flying competence to retain fundamental control of the aircraft.

Prioritisation becomes critical when several problems occur simultaneously: crews must identify the most immediate threat, determine what can wait, assess which information can still be trusted and choose actions that preserve the greatest number of options.

Pilots must also learn to make decisions without perfect information. In a rapidly changing situation, waiting until every uncertainty has been resolved may itself increase the risk.

Resilience is also a team capability. Effective crews need to share information, challenge assumptions, divide responsibilities and maintain a common understanding of what is happening.

Finally, Captain Chawan highlighted what he called “recovery thinking,” or the ability to move beyond dealing with the immediate failure and continue asking what outcome will give the aircraft and its occupants the best chance of survival.

The broader direction, he argued, is not away from compliance but beyond compliance: from knowing procedures to understanding systems and situations, from checking competence to developing operational judgement, and from training solely for known failures to preparing crews for failures that cannot be predicted.

And for instructors, Captain Chawan left APATS delegates with a direct challenge: “Do not let the boundaries of the simulator box become the boundaries of your students’ thinking.”