Threat and Error Management (TEM)

Threat and Error Management was formalized through the LOSA (Line Operations Safety Audit) observation methodology, a program that placed trained observers in the cockpit of normal commercial flights to record how crews actually managed the operating environment. ICAO Doc 9803 (Line Operations Safety Audit) and IATA's TEM framework grew from those observations, and EASA and FAA training material now reference TEM as the operational framework that operationalizes Crew Resource Management.

The TEM model defines three layered concepts. A threat is an event or condition outside the influence of the flight crew that increases operational complexity — adverse weather, ATC re-routing, runway changes, abnormal aircraft systems, fatigue, time pressure. An error is an action or inaction by the crew that deviates from intentions or expectations — a misread checklist, a missed callout, a wrong frequency selection. An undesired aircraft state is a position, configuration, or trajectory that compromises safety margins — high on the approach, off the centerline at touchdown, level bust, configuration not as briefed.

The operational discipline of TEM is the crew's active management of this stack: identifying threats early (briefings, threat-and-plan, weather review), preventing errors when threats are present (cross-checks, callouts, deliberate slowdown), trapping errors when they occur (the PM's challenge, the standard callout that catches the deviation), and recovering undesired aircraft states before they become incidents. TEM doesn't add new techniques — briefings, callouts, and challenge-and-response existed before TEM — but it provides the unifying framework that gives those techniques their purpose and lets the crew, the operator, and the regulator describe operational performance in consistent language.

TEM grading sits inside the CBTA framework. The competency "Problem Solving and Decision Making" includes OBs for identifying and assessing threats; "Situation Awareness" includes OBs for recognizing developing threats; "Application of Procedures" includes OBs for trapping errors through standard procedures. There is no separate TEM grade — TEM is graded through the OBs of the relevant competencies, exactly as the methodology requires.

TEM is the framework that bridges the gap between CRM training in the simulator and operational behavior on the line. Line pilots intuitively use TEM whether they have heard the acronym or not — every approach briefing identifies threats, every checklist is an error trap, every callout is an error-detection mechanism — but explicit TEM language gives instructors, examiners, and safety departments a shared vocabulary for describing what is actually happening.

For training organizations, the practical application of TEM is in scenario design. A TEM-aware lesson scenario embeds threats deliberately (a non-standard ATC request, a degraded weather forecast, an aircraft squawk that has to be managed) and grades the crew's threat identification, error prevention, and undesired-aircraft-state recovery — not just whether they completed the procedural list. This is fundamentally different from a checklist-driven scenario where the threat is listed in the lesson plan.

Aviatize's lesson plan structure supports threat tagging — a lesson designer can specify the threats embedded in a scenario, and the post-lesson grading interface presents the OBs relevant to identifying and managing those threats. Aggregated across a course, the data shows which threats trainees consistently miss and which OBs degrade in high-threat scenarios — diagnostic information for both individual remediation and curriculum revision.

For combined operations where the same competency framework spans initial training, line training, and recurrent EBT, Aviatize aggregates TEM-related OBs across a pilot's career — exposing the operational threats that recur and the competencies that need cyclical reinforcement. This is the data the safety department and the training department need to be working from the same picture, which is the whole point of TEM as a unifying framework.