Aviation Training Voices: Capt. Stéphan Labrucherie Head of Flight Training Worldwide AIRBUS
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1st in a Series of Conversations with Civil Aviation Safety & Training Leaders
Capt. Stéphan Labrucherie, Head of Flight Training Worldwide, AIRBUS
Stéphan Labrucherie made the transition from ‘checking’ opposing players as an ice hockey defenseman to ‘checking’ airmen as a pilot and flight instructor.
After playing for the French national junior hockey sur glace team, he spent several seasons in professional leagues, scoring a career-high 19 goals and 16 assists in 17 games for Compiègne in 1996-97.
After a stint in the French air force as a dispatcher, Labrucherie’s flying career included skydive pilot, oil company transport in the Sahara, senior First Officer for Corsair International, A320 TRI TRE and A330 Captain with Etihad Airways and A330 Captain at Air China.
Serving an apprenticeship at Airbus as a synthetic flight instructor in France and the UAE from 2002-09, he returned to the company as a pilot instructor in 2011, then became Head of TRIs Airbus Europe in 2015. He was also Local Head of Flight Training AETC before becoming Head of Worldwide Flight Training three years ago.
Rick Adams, FRAeS, spoke with Captain Labrucherie shortly before the Halldale Group’s European Airline Training Summit (EATS) in Cascais, Portugal.
Rick Adams: You were a defenseman.
Labrucherie: Yes, I was the bad guy, the tough guy.
Adams: How did you decide to switch from professional athlete to aviation?
Labrucherie: My father was my trainer. When I got injured, I needed to have a surgery that could jeopardize my career. So I had to stop ice hockey at an early age.
My plan was not to be a pilot. But my family were very involved in aviation since the 70s. We are seven pilots now in my family.
My father worked for ICAO. He was a pioneer in human factors in the 80s and 90s, an expert in aviation safety, CRM (crew resource management). [Marc Labrucherie was also an astronaut candidate and Air France pilot.]
So I was surrounded by this kind of environment.
Adams: Could you describe the current philosophy – what you would like to achieve with Airbus training and what you would like to impart for customer training?
Labrucherie: Since the beginning, our heritage in aviation, in Airbus, we try to deliver training. We want the pilot to be more competent and resilient. A resilient pilot has to be competent and confident. Without confidence, you can't be resilient.
Training is part of safety. It's not separated. Safety fits training; training fits safety.
What we realized since 2008 is that to continue to improve training, to feed safety, we need to embrace and move to CBTA, competency-based training and assessment.
We created, in 2014, the A350 program based on a new way to train. And it was a success.
And in 2017, we decided to copy-paste the approach to other programs to have a single reference. It was the beginning of the journey of the Airbus flight training reference with the Airbus 320, 330 and 350 aligned with the same concept.
Airlines are facing more and more complexity in terms of regulations, and CBTA requires a lot of expertise. It's not such an easy task to create CBTA training. We were there from the beginning. We now have some background.
We did a cooperation with IATA and Emirates, and this cooperation was to be able to demonstrate how to design CBTA training in the context of the type rating. We do this to set a mark, to show to our industry as a manufacturer what should be the way to train the pilots if they want to reach the target and objectives of CBTA.
We are increasing partnerships with the different operators to bring our standards, this Airbus reference, because we know we have a lot of data, so we can see what will be required in terms of training.
Adams: How would a partnership like that work? Would it be a mix of Airbus subject experts, airline and IATA folks collaborating, collecting data, analyzing data to refine the program?
Labrucherie: Emirates were an evidence-based training (EBT) operator. This is not the type rating. So they sought support for the new type ratings with the A350. And then because we were working with IATA on what CBTA should be, we decided to work all together to demonstrate that an operator like Emirates can bring in its own organization.
What people did not understand is CBTA is not just a grading system. It's more than that. First of all, we need to understand why we do CBTA – to be able to collect data. But for this you need to design a course using the ADDIE model. You need people to understand what should be the behavior of the instructor, how he has to interact with the trainee. Which competencies you want to target for each session? So you need to make this a kind of engineering approach.
We don't want to overload the trainee at the beginning or in the middle of the footprint of the type rating. It has to be a progressive approach that at the end we can reach a kind of autonomous level to be able to demonstrate performance in terms of behavior linked to CBTA. This is why it's complex to design.
You need people who know how to do it. It requires expertise in terms of training itself, but also about the requirements from regulations, requirements from Airbus, from the OSD (operational suitability data), inputs from IATA... When you put all these inputs at the same time, it requires different people on the table to reach such an objective. And it's always good to exchange a point of view, to get challenged.
Adams: So do I understand that, rather than the instructor trying to observe dozens of behaviors for all of the competencies in each session, you're essentially subdividing the competencies and the behaviors across multiple sessions of training?
Labrucherie: Yes, exactly. We designed a footprint so it's the same duration of days. Of course, normal and abnormal situations. But we need to take account that you can't assess the trainee in all competencies at the beginning of the training. It doesn't make any sense to talk about the decision making, because at the beginning he needs to learn first how to operate the aircraft in terms of knowledge, SOPs, etc. Manual skills are not there.
You need to define what you want to observe and how to observe it, and to explain in more detail why it's so complex. Sometimes, even in one competency, you will explain to the trainer that we don't want to see all OBs (observable behaviors) because sometimes it's not possible. You need to define what you are looking for each moment in a session, to be sure that we reach what we want in terms of competence. This is why it's very challenging.
And at the same time, we need to explain to an instructor at the beginning, you need to be close to your trainee because you need to talk a lot, to demonstrate a lot, to interfere a lot. But more and more in the progression of the training, we explain to the trainer how you want to give more freedom to the trainee to assess at the end the full scope of competences.
Adams: The challenge is educating the instructors who have been used to doing it a different way.
Labrucherie: The key in CBTA is the instructor. The instructor needs to be able to change the way to address things, to reach the objective, what we're looking for. So he needs to understand what we are looking for, how to address it, but also sometimes to change, to address it in terms of culture.
Adams: And what is the status of this partnership project?
Laburcherie: It's almost finished. This is what we create altogether through this collaboration for the whole Airbus training. Right now we are setting the final product; the launch for Airbus will be mid 2025 – to launch the new CBTA training from Airbus.
We try to support our customers in different environments. The problem is that sometimes CBTA is not recognized everywhere in the world. You have local regulations. They are still not yet at CBTA level... what we call legacy programs. We're able to address the local rules, different types of recurrent training, because we know that recurrent training is the DNA of the aircraft, the DNA of the airlines.
Sometimes airlines, even if they have the same aircraft, they do not operate the same way. So this is why you need to customize recurrent training and checking. We have some expertise in different regions, in different training centers. In Airbus, we have different people ready to support our customers in terms of how to design recurrent training and how to standardize the instructor.
Adams: Does this approach extend to ab initio training in the Airbus academies as well?
Labrucherie: When people reach the first type rating, when you jump from a cadet program to a jet, we observe all around the world different standards. This is why we decided to create a cadet program. We want to capture the needs from the airlines. They don't want to hire pilots; they want to hire the next captain. They want to hire the next manager. We train this young generation not to be a pilot, but to be the next captain or instructor of the company, and even sometimes the next manager of the airline.
There is an impact for the airlines because when those young women and men join the airlines, they don't have sometimes the right soft skills, the right mindsets, what would be required by aviation from Day One.
What we know is the cadets who have been released from our school in Mexico (Escuela de Aviación) or from Angoulême (France), the airlines were amazed by the way they were able to cope in such a new environment. We prepared them for that. If you want a solid house, you need a good foundation.
Adams: Where do you see the evolution of pilot training? Not just CBTA but artificial intelligence, VR, XR... obviously the regulators are trying to keep up with this. But where does Airbus see pilot training evolving over the next decade or two?
Labrucherie: We need to understand where we are right now in terms of the industry. We are looking for the new generation of pilots. We are looking at more and more complex aircraft. Regulation is not sometimes harmonized. And we need to continue to contribute as a training organization for the safety level. So of course there will be an evolution.
We are at the beginning of CBTA. We are not mature in our industry at the CBTA level. We need to capture data. Once again, safety fits training, training fits safety.
For Airbus training, we believe that the key in training is the instructor. You can have tools, but this is only tools. How are we going to use those tools? What could be the benefits of the tools? We need to change things to see what could be an improvement. But we should not lose from our vision exactly what we are looking for. Sometimes some tools are not yet mature and we don't know yet what we're going to do. The cycles of technology are very short now.
When we talk about training, there is also cost, bringing a lot of tools and at the end it costs a fortune to train a pilot. We don't use tools to be fancy. They need to be efficient. Because we are going to use those tools to capture metrics: eye trackers, voice analysis, data from simulators.
And of course all this information needs to go back to the instructor. So you need AI, artificial intelligence, to be able to make this work for the instructor. But now you have a challenge because we are going to change the role of the instructor. And I think this is where the industry right now we take the shortcut of the tools. At the end, we have to be very focused on the instructors, how we design aircraft.
We have to change the way we train, how to capture the data, how to analyze data. It will change his role and the way he has to act. This is where we have to be cautious. It doesn't mean that we have to be conservative, because we will never be conservative. We are pioneers in aviation since Day One, and we'll continue to contribute as we can. But we need to be cautious in the way that if we go too fast, maybe we're going to lose a lot of instructors. And I think that industry can't afford that because aviation is also based on experience.
We need to find a way to incorporate all these innovations. With instructors that are not yet ready to swallow such a huge step of technology. This is why we have to be cautious and we have to go step-by-step. This is what we are doing.
We have a contract with Hinfact, a company based in Toulouse from Supaéro (EATS Booth 314). They created a startup. We're working with them now. We are at the first stage of the rocket to provide our data and make our instructors to be standardized on the product, and then how to use it.
It's a great asset because they are very keen to follow a vision in terms of how we use the machine. And they are very smart, very brilliant, very agile in terms of AI.
What they are preparing, I think, is going to be very promising. Airbus will use this technology to be able to be fulfill our own strategy in terms of digitalization and the new technologies in training.
And then coming soon, we will incorporate eye trackers, voice analysis, let's say 2025 or 2026, working to be able to bring information to the instructor. But we need to define which kind of information we want to see.
Once again, we need to collect data. For what? What is the vision? What is the strategy? Because having data, and you don't know what you're doing with this, it doesn't make any sense. And this is the challenge, I think, for the coming years, for education to be more modern, to change the way we train.
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