PANS-TRG (ICAO Doc 9868, Training)

PANS-TRG is the short name for ICAO Doc 9868, Procedures for Air Navigation Services — Training. Like the other PANS documents, it carries material that is too detailed for full Standard status in the Annexes but is applied internationally, so ICAO publishes it as procedures. What PANS-TRG procedures do is translate the licensing Standards in Annex 1 (Personnel Licensing) and the operational training requirements in Annex 6 (Operation of Aircraft) into a concrete methodology for building and running training and assessment programmes. In other words, it is the layer that tells a State and its training organizations how to actually deliver competency-based training rather than merely requiring that they do.

The central idea running through Doc 9868 is competency-based training and assessment (CBTA): the principle that pilots and other aviation professionals are trained and evaluated against defined, observable standards of performance rather than against a fixed number of hours. PANS-TRG provides the procedures for developing such programmes, including the competency framework — a set of core competencies, each described by observable behaviors that an instructor or examiner can assess consistently. This framework is the common backbone beneath several distinct programmes that ATOs recognize by name.

PANS-TRG underpins the Multi-crew Pilot Licence (MPL), the competency-based, airline-oriented ab-initio pathway defined in Annex 1 and detailed procedurally in Doc 9868. It underpins Evidence-Based Training (EBT), the approach to recurrent training that uses operational data to decide what crews should train on, rather than repeating a fixed script — providing an alternative means of meeting the recurrent training requirements of Annex 6. And it underpins Upset Prevention and Recovery Training (UPRT), the harmonized training aimed at reducing loss-of-control-in-flight accidents, which is promulgated across Annex 1, Annex 6, and PANS-TRG for both on-aircraft training at the commercial and MPL levels and simulator training at the airline transport pilot and type-rating levels.

Doc 9868 does not stand alone; it is supported by ICAO manuals that carry the detailed guidance behind each concept. The Manual of Evidence-based Training (Doc 9995) elaborates the EBT competency framework and implementation, and the Manual on Aeroplane Upset Prevention and Recovery Training (Doc 10011) provides the detailed UPRT guidance that PANS-TRG references. Together, the procedures in Doc 9868 and the guidance in these manuals form the international source material from which national competency-based training rules are written.

The practical significance for a training organization is that the modern EASA and FAA training constructs it operates under are not independent inventions. EASA's competency-based instrument rating, its MPL and evidence-based training provisions, and the FAA's competency- and scenario-based training approaches all trace their DNA back to the same ICAO procedures. An ATO designing a contemporary curriculum that assesses core competencies through observable behaviors is, whether or not it says so, implementing the architecture that PANS-TRG defines.

For an ATO, PANS-TRG is worth understanding because it explains why the training world has shifted from counting hours to assessing competencies. When a school moves to a curriculum built around core competencies and observable behaviors — grading a student on threat and error management, situational awareness, or manual aircraft control rather than simply logging that a lesson happened — it is adopting the model that ICAO codified in Doc 9868. Recognizing the common source makes it easier to see why EASA and FAA training reforms rhyme with one another, and it helps a school design a curriculum that will map cleanly onto whichever national rule set its graduates need.

It also matters for organizations that train across the airline pathway. The MPL, evidence-based recurrent training, and UPRT are among the most demanding programmes an ATO can offer, and each carries specific expectations about instructor qualification, assessment design, and record-keeping. An organization that treats these as competency frameworks — with defined behaviors to be observed, graded, and evidenced — rather than as hour requirements is aligned with the international intent, and is far better placed to satisfy an auditor who asks how competency was actually assessed and recorded.

Aviatize's Training Management module is built for competency-based syllabi: it lets an ATO define the competencies and observable behaviors a lesson is meant to develop, record how each student was graded against them, and keep the assessment history that a modern PANS-TRG-derived curriculum depends on. Instead of a logbook that only shows hours, the organization holds a record that shows demonstrated competence.

The Ground Training & Checking module extends the same structure to the theoretical and checking side, so that the full picture of a cadet's progress — knowledge, observed behaviors, and check outcomes — lives in one place. That is exactly the evidence an examiner or inspector expects when verifying that competency-based training was genuinely delivered rather than nominally claimed.