Every pilot is trained and tested against competencies, TEM, CBTA and EBT. Almost no one explains what they actually mean.
Modern airline training speaks a new language. You're graded on nine competencies, from one to five. Your recurrent check is "evidence-based." Threat and Error Management underpins everything. Yet most pilots are assessed against this framework long before anyone hands them a plain explanation of how it all fits together - or what a check pilot is really looking for.
Flying Competent is that explanation.
Written by a Chief Flight Instructor with twenty-three years on the assessment side of the flight deck - across the Gulf, Europe and beyond - this is the guide for the line pilot, not the training department. It turns a soup of acronyms into a tool you can actually use: to understand how you're judged, to prepare for a competency-based check, to make the step to command, and to keep getting better across a whole career.
In clear, no-nonsense language, you'll find:
Whether you're a first officer facing your next assessment, a captain shaping a crew, an instructor refining your craft, or a cadet trying to make sense of it all, this book gives you the language - and the confidence - to own your development instead of being surprised by it.
The ideas apply wherever you fly. If you work in a US Part 121 operation, an AQP or EBT programme, or you are a check airman or CFI preparing candidates, you will find the same nine competencies, the same threat-and-error thinking and the same grading logic explained in plain English. Flying Competent is the first book in a series: The Competent Instructor is for the person doing the assessing, and Flying Competent: Private Pilot (coming soon) brings the same ideas to student and private pilots.
Stop being assessed against a framework you were never taught. Understand it, use it, and fly competent.
