Course Approval

Approving an organisation and approving a course are separate acts, and conflating them is a common and expensive error. An ATO approval establishes that the organisation is fit to train; a course approval establishes that a particular programme, delivered by that organisation, meets the requirements for the credential it leads to.

What is submitted for approval is a package rather than a document. It typically includes the **syllabus** — lesson-by-lesson objectives, sequence and prerequisites; the **hours breakdown** across dual, solo, instrument, simulator and ground instruction, against the regulatory minima; **assessment points**, meaning progress tests, stage checks and the entry standard for the skill test; the **resources**, meaning aircraft types, flight simulation training devices, instructor qualifications and the facilities; and the **course-specific procedures** that sit within the organisation's wider manuals.

In the EASA system an ATO's courses are approved as part of, or alongside, its organisational approval under Part-ORA, with the training programme and training manual forming the substance. A Declared Training Organisation may only run courses within the scope its declaration permits. In the FAA system the analogous instrument is the **Training Course Outline** approved for a Part 141 pilot school under 14 CFR 141.55 and the relevant appendix, which specifies curriculum content and minimum hours for the certificate or rating.

The operative constraint is that **the approval attaches to the course as documented**. Delivering a different sequence, substituting an aircraft type outside the approval, using an instructor without the specified qualification, or skipping an assessment point does not merely deviate from a plan — it can mean the training does not count, and the finding is retrospective across every student who went through it.

This is why **change control** matters more than the initial submission. A course evolves: an aircraft type is added, a lesson is resequenced, a simulator is introduced. Some of these changes require prior approval and some do not, and the distinction is in the regulation and the organisation's own approved procedures. Making a change that needed approval without obtaining it is among the more serious findings available, because it calls into question every course completion since.

The approved course also sets the **credit** rules: what previous experience or a prior licence allows a student to skip, and what has to be repeated.

For a school, the useful discipline is to treat the approved course as the operating specification rather than as a filing requirement, and to make deviations visible while they are still small. A syllabus that is being informally resequenced by instructors is a finding waiting to happen, and the people doing it usually believe they are being helpful.

The second discipline is evidencing delivery. An approval says what should happen; an audit asks for proof of what did. Where the training record cannot show that a student completed the approved exercises in the approved order against a qualified instructor, the course was effectively unapproved for that student.

The commercial consideration is scope. Each approved course carries an administrative cost — manuals, change control, instructor qualification, audit surface — so a school running many thinly-populated approvals may be paying for scope it does not use.

Aviatize holds the syllabus as structured training content rather than as a document to be interpreted: multi-phase syllabi with lesson-by-lesson objectives, prerequisites and sequence, instructor grading against those exercises, and per-student progression visible as the course is delivered. That makes the gap between the approved course and the delivered course something a head of training can see while it is still small.

Because training records, bookings, aircraft and instructor qualifications sit on one record, evidence of delivery is a by-product of operating rather than a reconstruction exercise. The validation engine can require documents, endorsements and currency at the syllabus, booking-type and aircraft levels before a lesson is confirmed, so an unqualified instructor or a missing prerequisite is caught before the flight. Compliance auditing tracks internal audits and their findings through to closure. Obtaining the approval, maintaining the manuals and deciding what constitutes a change requiring prior approval remain the organisation's own.