Matt Thurber, editor-in-chief at AIN Media Group, has been flying since 1975 and writing about aviation since 1978 and now has the best job in the world, running editorial operations for Aviation International News, Business Jet Traveler, and FutureFlight.aero. In addition to working as an A&amp;P mechanic on everything from Piper Cubs to turboprops, Matt taught flying at his father’s flight school in Plymouth, Mass., in the early 1980s, flew for an aircraft owner/pilot, and for two summer seasons hunted swordfish near the George’s Banks off the East Coast from a Piper Super Cub. An ATP certificated fixed-wing pilot and CFII and commercial helicopter pilot, Matt is type-rated in the Citation 500 and Gulfstream V/550. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Matt and his team cover the entire aviation scene including business aircraft, helicopters, avionics, safety, manufacturing, charter, fractionals, technology, air transport, advanced air mobility, defense, and other subjects of interest to AIN, BJT, and FutureFlight readers.

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Training providers are capturing data during training events and combining this with operational data to improve pilot training outcomes, CAE senior manager of product management Clément Cateau explained this morning at Bombardier Safety Standdown 2025. &nbsp;His presentation, “Enhance Safety Intelligence with Training Data,” explored how this data is being used to improve training and support safety management systems (SMS).
Just as aircraft operators use flight operational quality assurance to leverage aircraft data for SMS programs, so too are training providers with what is being called simulator operational quality assurance. This is all part of what Cateau identified as "safety intelligence…it’s about collecting data, transforming raw data into actionable insights for safety management systems.”
While Cateau’s presentation delved into various aspects of safety intelligence, one of the more interesting points he made was about the growing use of artificial intelligence tools in analyzing the data that is captured.
He said the goal of using training data to enhance safety intelligence is “knowing what happened, why it happened, and providing automatically the recommendations to all different stakeholders and organizations…in an automated way.” This is done manually now and isn’t very systematic, Cateau added. In the future, however, there should be automatic ways to provide feedback based on operations and training data, and draw profiles and other inputs. “But we’re not quite there yet.”
Where AI could help would be in that automation, but Cateau sees AI as an aid, not a replacement, for all the stakeholders involved in training (pilots, instructors, heads of training and safety, OEMs, and regulators). “It’s a powerful technology that we should definitely consider,” he said.
More specifically, he explained, AI can provide helpful information—for example, during a debriefing after a training session because it has access to more data and observations that an instructor might not have seen. When combined with eye-tracking tools, “it will also be beneficial in terms of predictive crew performance modeling,” Cateau said.
“Based on analyzing previous scenarios and previous outcomes, we can one day create models that will…provide the outcome before they run in simulators and provide feedback to the operational world with that, and…maybe update some of the SOPs or training or [aircraft] design.”
AI might also help mitigate operational drift, where pilots increasingly fly outside of specified parameters. Using the concept of unsupervised learning, the safety intelligence data is tapped for useful information. “You feed the machine with the data and you let it find patterns, trends, correlation between inputs,” he said.
“So data mining…if we have the infrastructure to look at that in a very comprehensive way, we can expect some findings on the operational drift. For example, it’s really hard for a human to capture, is there an operational drift or not? It's very hard to answer that question, but having a more comprehensive dataset and some AI algorithms we can expect in the future, maybe [there is] some additional capability towards reducing that drift.”

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Artificial intelligence tools will use captured information to improve training outcomes

One of the more interesting points during the safety intelligence presentation was about the growing use of AI tools in analyzing the data that is captured.

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