CBTA & EU Regulation 2025/2143 for ATCO Training

EU Regulation 2025/2143, adopted in October 2025, amends Regulation (EU) 2015/340 and sets a mandatory transition to Competency-Based Training and Assessment (CBTA) for all European ANSPs by January 1, 2029. It also formally recognises virtual and distance training methods.

This regulation doesn’t just change how training is structured. It changes what ANSPs must be able to prove. Audit authorities will expect explicit traceability between competency objectives, simulator exercises, and KSA assessments, demonstrable at any point in time, not assembled retrospectively before an audit.

ICAO Doc 9868 and Doc 10056 define the underlying methodology: the ADDIE framework, competency units, performance criteria, Particular Control Situations (PCS), and KSA assessment structures. EU 2025/2143 makes this methodology legally binding for European states. For ANSPs outside Europe, ICAO USOAP audits are creating equivalent pressure.

Most training organisations already deliver competency-based training in practice. The challenge isn’t the methodology, it’s demonstrating it.

Under EU 2025/2143, each simulator session must be traceable to specific performance objectives. The distribution of Particular Control Situations must be intentional and balanced across trainees and cohorts. KSA assessments must be consistent across instructors and sites. And all of this must be auditable without requiring weeks of manual data collection.

That level of demonstrability requires infrastructure that most ATC training centres don’t yet have. Exercise design is still manual in most organisations. PCS distribution relies on instructor experience rather than a structured framework. Assessment records are fragmented across paper forms and individual spreadsheets.

The 2029 deadline is closer than it looks. ANSPs that start building this infrastructure now avoid the risk of last-minute compliance scrambles.

Most ATC Training Plans were built on experience, years of accumulated knowledge from senior instructors, refined through practice. They work. The training they produce is often very good.

But they weren’t designed to be audited against a competency framework. Exercises were selected based on what instructors knew worked, not because they were explicitly mapped to a performance objective. PCS distribution wasn’t tracked systematically. KSA acquisition was assessed, but not always documented in a way that survives a regulatory audit.

Redesigning a Training Plan from scratch is a significant undertaking, and organisations are understandably reluctant to disrupt something that works. The good news is that CBTA alignment doesn’t require starting over: it requires making explicit what was always implicit, within a structured framework.

EDS (Exercise Design for Simulators) is a cloud-based platform built specifically to turn CBTA requirements into manageable daily processes for ATC simulator training.

For each rating, EDS provides predefined modules with performance objectives and weighted PCS, aligned with ICAO Doc 9868 and the requirements of EU 2025/2143. An intelligent exercise generation engine creates balanced simulator sessions in one click, ensuring consistent control load across trainees and cohorts.

Instructors use standardised KSA assessment sheets linked directly to the exercises, feeding a centralised learning analytics dashboard. All training events are stored via xAPI and an LRS, creating a complete, audit-ready record without additional administrative work.

For multi-site organisations, EDS synchronises training data across locations, enabling training managers to identify inconsistencies and adjust syllabi based on evidence rather than intuition.

The French Navy (Base Aéronavale de Lann-Bihoué) has been using EDS since August 2024. Exercise creation is approximately three times faster than with previous methods, with full traceability and audit-ready reporting built in.

See how EDS helps ANSPs build audit-ready CBTA training infrastructure.