Observable Behaviours (OBs)

An observable behavior is exactly what the name says: a behavior that a third party (an instructor or examiner) can observe and grade without inferring intent. Each ICAO/IATA core competency is operationalized through a catalogue of OBs that demonstrate it. For example, the competency "Communication" is graded through OBs such as "ensures the recipient is ready and able to receive the information," "selects appropriately what, when, how and with whom to communicate," "conveys messages clearly, accurately and concisely," and "confirms that the recipient correctly understands important information." Each of those is a discrete, observable action — not an inference about the pilot's mental state.

The distinction matters because OBs are gradeable inter-rater. Two examiners watching the same lesson should agree, within a tolerance, on whether the trainee briefed the approach, whether they verified the platform altitude, whether they confirmed PM understanding. They are far less likely to agree on whether the trainee "communicated well." CBTA grading relies on the OB layer specifically because it produces the inter-rater reliability that aggregated competency data requires.

ICAO Doc 9995 (and IATA's equivalent guidance material) publishes a baseline OB catalogue, but operators are expected to elaborate it for their specific operation and aircraft type. A long-haul widebody operator's OBs for "Workload Management" emphasize different behaviors from a single-pilot light-aircraft operator's. EASA's APS-MCC AMC and the various competency-based type-rating programs likewise reference the same baseline but allow operator-specific tailoring within the regulator-approved framework.

The modern grading scale used with OBs is typically a 1-to-5 anchored rating scale, with each level explicitly defined: 1 = unacceptable, 2 = below standard, 3 = standard, 4 = above standard, 5 = exemplary. The anchored definitions remove most of the residual subjectivity from the grading process — and, again, are the basis for inter-rater reliability across the instructor team.

Observable behaviors are the data layer of CBTA. The competency layer is for human reasoning (a trainee is weak in Workload Management); the OB layer is for evidence (specifically these three behaviors have been graded 2 across the last six lessons with three different instructors). Without the OB layer, competency assessment becomes instructor opinion. With it, the school produces evidence-grade data on every trainee, every instructor, and every cohort.

The operational risk is over- or under-elaboration of the OB catalogue. A catalogue with 200 OBs is unusable in practice — instructors revert to grading the competency directly because they can't hold 200 OBs in working memory during a debrief. A catalogue with 20 OBs loses too much resolution. The published ICAO and IATA baselines (typically 60–80 OBs across the nine competencies) is the calibrated middle ground that operators should start from.

Aviatize stores the school's observable behavior catalogue as configurable, version-controlled data linked to the competency it operationalizes. Each lesson plan references the specific OBs the lesson is designed to develop, and the post-lesson grading interface presents those OBs directly — turning grading into the act of marking the OBs the trainee actually demonstrated, not into the act of inferring a competency grade from memory.

For the chief instructor and Head of Training, OB-level data is the diagnostic that program quality improvement runs on. Aviatize aggregates OB outcomes across students, courses, and instructors, surfacing patterns that the human eye cannot see across hundreds of lessons — the OB nobody is grading well, the instructor whose distributions diverge from peers, the syllabus point where a particular OB stops being met. That data is exactly what a competent regulator audit will ask for, and what airline-customer due diligence will probe.