The EDMA Model in Depth
EDMA describes how flying skill forms, holds, and transfers across six layers. The pilot sits at the centre, and each layer outward shapes what the pilot can perceive, do, and learn.
Perceptual Systems
How the pilot reads the environment to guide action. This is what the pilot sees, feels, and hears that shows the glidepath, the drift, and the coordination of the aircraft.
Cognitive-Affective Systems
How attention, workload, judgement, and emotion shape performance. Under high workload or surprise, attention narrows and stress can disrupt a response the pilot knows well.
Operational Context
The immediate setting of the flight: aircraft, weather, terrain, traffic, airspace, and the task at hand. This setting decides what actions are possible and what information the pilot has to work with.
Sociocultural and Organisational Systems
The training culture around the pilot. Whether questions are welcomed, errors are owned, and uncertainty is treated as normal decides what a learner can safely do and say.
Values and Dispositions
The beliefs and attitudes a pilot and instructor bring to flight, including their view of risk, authority, and feedback. These are personal, and they shape how a person responds to everything around them.
Time and Technology
The two influences that act across all the other layers. Time governs how skill is built, retained, and refreshed. Technology, from avionics to simulation, shapes what the pilot can perceive and do.
How EDMA Includes Existing Tools
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Competency-based and procedural models do important work in flight training. Competency frameworks set out the outcomes a pilot must reach. Procedural frameworks set out the sequences of action a pilot must perform. Both support regulation, standards, and assessment. The question of how a pilot comes to learn those things, and how skill forms, holds, and adapts as conditions change, sits outside their scope.
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EDMA provides the missing foundation. It describes how skill develops across the six layers, and it holds standards and procedures within that structure, so they sit inside a training design grounded in how pilots actually learn.
Where aviation already uses these ideas
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Aviation already applies many of EDMA's principles through established programs. Each addresses one or two layers. None brings them all together.
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Threat and Error Management
Embedded in pilot training worldwide and required by CASA as a flight test item. It works
within EDMA's operational context and training culture, where threats are read and managed.
Upset Prevention and Recovery Training
Builds a pilot's ability to prevent an aircraft upset, to recognise the conditions that lead to one, and to recover if it occurs. It puts EDMA's perceptual and cognitive-affective layers into practice, including the moments where the correct action runs against instinct.
Aeronautical Decision Making
Models for judgement under uncertainty. They work within EDMA's cognitive-affective layer, and
EDMA anchors them in cue reading, since a pilot must first notice the right information.
Scenario-Based Training
Endorsed by the FAA, it teaches decision-making in realistic situations rather than isolated manoeuvres. It works because it keeps the real demands of flying, which is EDMA's operational context.
Evidence-Based Training
Uses operational data over time to shape recurrent training. It reflects EDMA's time dimension, and EDMA extends the same idea into early training, where it is largely absent.
EDMA and the Nine Principles
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Rich Stowell's Nine Principles of Light Aeroplane Flying set out the core skills and dispositions of light aircraft flying. EDMA and the Nine Principles share a philosophy of elegant simplicity. Where the Nine Principles describe what a pilot needs to do, EDMA describes how a pilot learns to perceive it, respond to it, and retain that capability over time.