The ACT Program
Aircrew Cognitive Training: four disciplines, engineered into the operation.
ACT is the program COGVATION builds, trains, and governs for each client. It supplements — and never replaces — a client’s required FAA-approved technical and procedural training.
The Four Pillars, In Full
Focus, Direction, and Cognitive Cooperation are the competencies. Leadership is the habit that sustains them.
Pillar 01
Focus
The discipline of directing attention at what matters most, and holding it there as workload, fatigue, and distraction increase. In the curriculum, Focus is trained through scenarios that deliberately stack competing demands — radio calls, checklist items, and unexpected system indications arriving at once — so crews practice triage under realistic pressure rather than in a single-task classroom exercise.
Pillar 02
Direction
Turning attention into clear action: a stated plan, a complete briefing, a documented decision that leaves no ambiguity about what happens next. Direction is trained as an observable behavior — specific briefing structures and decision call-outs that an evaluator or fellow crew member can hear and assess, not an internal mental state that has to be inferred.
Pillar 03
Cognitive Cooperation
The structured practice of checking, questioning, and correcting one another in real time, so no single mind ever carries a critical decision alone. This pillar operationalizes the cross-checking principles at the center of Crew Resource Management, built into scenarios specific to the client’s fleet and route structure rather than taught as a generic communication skill.
Pillar 04
Leadership
A habit practiced at every seat and every station, not a function of rank or title — because an operation’s margin is only as strong as its least confident voice. Leadership is the fourth pillar because it is what makes the first three durable: a crew that has learned to focus, direct, and cooperate will still fail under real pressure if no one at the table is willing to exercise that judgment out loud.
How The Curriculum Is Built
A scenario library built for one fleet, one operating environment, one safety culture.
Each ACT curriculum begins with the client’s own fleet, route network, and existing safety culture — never a shared, off-the-shelf template applied across multiple carriers. The design work covers three linked components:
- — Core competencies: the four pillars, defined into observable behaviors specific to flight-deck and hangar-floor roles.
- — Scenario library: exercises that put those competencies under realistic, fleet-specific operational pressure.
- — Assessment approach: how instructors and evaluators observe and score the competencies during training and recurrent events.
Assessment & Certification
Competency-based, not maneuver-based.
ACT’s assessment approach follows the same direction as EASA and ICAO’s Evidence-Based Training (EBT) and Competency-Based Training and Assessment (CBTA) frameworks, which have shifted evaluation away from maneuver checklists toward core competencies — workload management, situation awareness, problem-solving, and decision-making.
Instructor certification is part of the Train stage of COGVATION’s engagement model: COGVATION certifies the client’s own instructors to observe, coach, and assess the four pillars directly, so assessment capability lives inside the client’s organization rather than depending on COGVATION’s continued presence in every class.
Scope Statement
ACT supplements — and never replaces — a client’s required FAA-approved technical and procedural training.
COGVATION is not a certification authority or a regulator. The Aircrew Cognitive Training program is the cognitive-performance layer that sits alongside required technical training — it does not stand in for type-rating courses, recurrent procedural training, or any FAA-mandated curriculum.
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