Crew Resource Management (CRM)

CRM emerged from the National Transportation Safety Board's analysis of a sequence of fatal accidents in the 1970s — most prominently United 173 (Portland, 1978) and Tenerife (1977) — in which technically competent crews lost aircraft to communication, leadership, and decision-making failures rather than to mechanical or aerodynamic causes. NASA's 1979 Resource Management on the Flightdeck workshop introduced the term "Cockpit Resource Management," which broadened by the 1990s into Crew Resource Management as the role of cabin crew, dispatch, and ATC interaction was incorporated.

The modern CRM curriculum is codified into the same nine ICAO core competencies that underpin CBTA — Communication, Leadership and Teamwork, Problem Solving and Decision Making, Situation Awareness, Workload Management, and the Flight Path Management competencies all have an explicit CRM component. EASA Part-ORO ORO.FC.115 (commercial air transport) and AMC1 to ORO.FC.115 mandate initial CRM training, recurrent CRM training, and command course CRM for AOC operators. The FAA's Advisory Circular 120-51E (Crew Resource Management Training) provides equivalent guidance for Part 121 and 135 operators.

CRM is taught both as standalone modules — typically a multi-day initial course and a recurrent annual refresher — and as integrated content within line training, type rating courses, and recurrent EBT sessions. Modern integrated CRM training rejects the early "charm school" reputation the discipline acquired in the 1980s — soft skills taught in isolation that line pilots dismissed — and instead embeds CRM into operationally realistic scenarios where the consequences of a CRM failure are immediate and observable.

Two concepts pair tightly with CRM in current practice. Threat and Error Management (TEM) is the operational framework — derived from LOSA observations — for how crews actually identify and manage threats and errors in real time, and is graded against the same OBs as the underlying CRM competencies. Just Culture is the organizational substrate that makes CRM training effective: in a culture where reporting an error generates punishment rather than learning, the CRM behaviors the training tries to instill don't transfer to the line.

For training organizations, CRM training delivery is a recurring quality challenge. CRM facilitators need specific qualification — under EASA AMC1 ORO.FC.115, an initial CRM facilitator must have completed a CRM facilitator course and be approved by the operator. For ATOs delivering integrated commercial training, CRM is woven through MCC, APS-MCC, and type rating courses, and the integration has to be deliberate rather than nominal.

The assessment side is where CRM most often falls down. CRM behaviors are competency-graded — a trainee who briefs poorly, fails to call deviations, or does not advocate when seeing an error is failing CRM regardless of how well they hand-flew the manoeuvre. Schools that grade CRM with a separate "CRM grade" disconnected from the operational lesson grade reproduce the early-1980s mistake of treating CRM as a soft skill rather than as the operational discipline ICAO has codified.

Aviatize's training management module integrates CRM grading directly into the operational lesson grade — the CRM-related observable behaviors sit alongside the flight-path-management OBs in the same lesson grading interface, so a CRM failure is graded at the moment it happens, not at the end-of-course CRM debrief. This is the methodology shift modern CRM training requires, and the platform structure encourages it rather than fighting it.

For recurrent CRM under EBT and for command-course CRM at operators, Aviatize tracks each pilot's CRM-relevant competencies across their career, producing the longitudinal data that lets the training department target individual development needs rather than running the same generic refresher year after year. CRM facilitator qualifications are tracked alongside other instructor authorizations, with renewal alerts and proficiency-check tracking tied to the regulator's specific requirements.