EASA Assessment of Competence (Instructor Competencies, FCL.920)

Under Commission Regulation (EU) No 1178/2011 (the Aircrew Regulation), EASA regulates who may instruct through Part-FCL Subpart J. The keystone provision is FCL.920, which sets out the competencies every instructor must possess, and the mechanism for confirming them is the Assessment of Competence — a formal examination conducted by an authorized examiner in which the candidate must demonstrate, in practice, that they can teach. Where the FAA separates instructional theory (the Fundamentals of Instructing, or FOI) from the flight-instructor practical test, EASA folds instructional knowledge and instructional performance together into a single competency framework and a single assessment against it.

FCL.920 frames instructor ability around a set of competencies, grouped under the heading of teaching and learning, that the acceptable means of compliance (AMC1 FCL.920) elaborates in detail. These include preparing resources (facilities, briefing material, and lesson planning); creating a climate conducive to learning (establishing credibility and clarifying roles and objectives); presenting knowledge effectively and identifying teaching opportunities; integrating threat and error management and CRM into technical instruction, including upset-prevention content for aeroplanes; managing time to meet the competency objectives; facilitating learning through coaching, patience, and encouragement rather than mere lecturing; assessing trainee performance against the standard and observing CRM behavior; monitoring and reviewing progress and applying corrective action for individual learning differences; and evaluating the training session, gathering feedback and keeping records. Each competency is expressed as observable behaviors paired with the underpinning knowledge the instructor must hold — the same competency-and-behavior logic that runs through modern competency-based training.

The Assessment of Competence itself combines a demonstration of instructional ability with an oral examination. The candidate is required to plan and deliver instruction — typically including a long briefing or test lecture on a chosen technical subject, an airborne (or simulator) segment in which they demonstrate flight or synthetic instruction while managing a nominal trainee, and a debrief — and is examined orally by the examiner on the instructor competencies and relevant theoretical knowledge. The examiner grades not whether the candidate can fly the exercise, which is assumed, but whether they can teach it: whether the briefing was clear, the demonstration was correctly paced and explained, errors were caught and corrected, and the debrief developed the trainee. This structure recurs across the instructor certificates — the Flight Instructor (FI), Class Rating Instructor (CRI), Instrument Rating Instructor (IRI), Type Rating Instructor (TRI), and Synthetic Flight Instructor (SFI) each require an Assessment of Competence for initial issue and, in most cases, for revalidation or renewal.

Within an Approved Training Organisation, the Assessment of Competence is the backbone of instructor standardization. It is not a one-time hurdle: FCL.920 competencies define what an ATO's standardization program must keep its instructors calibrated against, and instructor certificates are revalidated on a fixed cycle — commonly three years for many instructor certificates — through refresher training and, where required, a further assessment. The FAA achieves a broadly similar end through the Flight Instructor Airman Certification Standards, the Fundamentals of Instructing knowledge test, and the Flight Instructor Refresher Course (FIRC) cycle, but the vocabulary and structure differ enough that the two systems are a frequent point of confusion for instructors converting licences between them.

For an ATO, the Assessment of Competence and the FCL.920 competency framework behind it are what turn instructor standardization from an aspiration into a measurable obligation. Because instructor certificates carry expiry dates and revalidation requirements, and because the competencies are defined as observable behaviors, an ATO has to track which instructors hold which certificates, when each is due for refresher training or reassessment, and whether the standardization program is actually holding the instructor team to the FCL.920 standard. A lapsed instructor rating or a missed refresher is not a paperwork nuisance — it can invalidate the training an instructor has delivered.

The framework also shapes how an ATO grades. FCL.920's assessment-of-competence logic — competencies demonstrated through observable behaviors, with feedback and record-keeping built in — is the same logic the ATO is expected to apply to its own students under competency-based training. An ATO that assesses its instructors against a competency framework but its students against a maneuver checklist has an internal inconsistency that surfaces quickly under a competent-authority audit. Keeping instructor qualifications, standardization records, and student competency grading in one coherent system is what makes the whole structure defensible.

Aviatize's Training Management module tracks each instructor's FCL.920 certificates — FI, CRI, IRI, TRI, and SFI — alongside their teaching authorizations, with revalidation and refresher deadlines surfaced before they lapse so an ATO never delivers training on an expired instructor rating. Assessment-of-competence outcomes and standardization records sit in the same system as the instructor's profile, giving the Head of Training an auditable trail of how the team is kept calibrated to the FCL.920 standard.

With Compliance & Auditing, the ATO can present a competent authority with a coherent picture — instructor competencies, currency, and student competency grading all recorded against the same framework — rather than reconciling separate spreadsheets during an inspection. That consistency is exactly what the FCL.920 model expects an ATO to maintain.