A response to Norman MacLeod’s “Treating Pilots Like Cattle” (LinkedIn, 18 August 2026)
Cedric Paillard — Chief Executive Officer, Amris Aviation
Norman MacLeod’s piece posted 18 August is the most useful thing written about EBT in a while, and I want to start by agreeing with the part most people will skip past.
His prediction is that EBT becomes EBTA — Evidence Based Training Audit. Regulators who don’t have the capacity or the domain knowledge to oversee competency-based frameworks will do what they did with SMS, FRMS, IOSA and LOSA: push the burden of demonstration onto the operator. The accountable manager then discovers, at the worst possible moment, that they are accountable for something nobody ever built the means to evidence.
That is exactly right, and it is coming faster than the industry thinks.
Where I part company with Mr. MacLeod is on why we got here, and therefore on what to do about it.