There are changes afoot in the airside environment – and training will need to keep up…
According to The International Air Cargo Association (TIACA), it is estimated that there are over 2.3 million staff employed by ground handlers worldwide.
“Ground handlers provide vital services to the carriers who appoint them and the community that interfaces with them. From passenger terminals to ramp activities to cargo facilities, they are on the front line of customer service and are a critical component of ensuring safety and security compliance. And yet, this vital component of commercial aviation is unregulated,” TIACA says.
But now, ground handling regulations are evolving on various fronts. From 2026, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) will introduce new standards.
In summary, the amendments to Annex 14, Vol 1 relate to obstacle limitation surfaces (OLS) technical criteria, visual aids specifications and ground handling safety assessment.
ICAO explains: “New performance-based requirements for obstacle management at and in the vicinity of airports consider both aviation and non-aviation stakeholders, helping airports optimise land use while maintaining safety; enhanced visual aids will give pilots better situational awareness, particularly during temporary changes to movement areas. These include the introduction of runway distance remaining signs, visual aids to denote closed runway and taxiway, and unserviceability signs.
“Additionally, States must now regularly assess the impacts of ground handling on safety, which will help reduce accidents and incidents.”
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), meanwhile, will regulate Europe’s ground handlers through its Regulation 2025/20-24, which sets out “requirements for the safe provision of ground handling services and for organisations providing them”.
TIACA says the new regulation will for the first time establish regulatory obligations addressing safety management, oversight, training, reporting and other critical measures.
“This new aspect of regulatory oversight may ultimately lead to a reduced burden of carrier initiated audits and certainly should lead to enhanced quality levels and overall industry improvement,” the association adds.
However, the response is mixed. As reported by Airside’s sister publication, Executive and VIP Aviation International, in May this year, London Oxford Airport’s then-head of business development James Dillon-Godfray is concerned that: “For airports like Oxford, the cost of training personnel for those new [ICAO] rules will become more costly and more difficult” and described the upcoming changes as “a regulatory nightmare”.
From the perspective of ground handlers, says Challenge Group head of industry relations and marketing Gianluca Marcangelo, “the [EASA] regulation introduces formal compliance obligations, including the development of comprehensive operational manuals and adherence to standardised training programmes.
“While these requirements may entail initial financial investments to align with the new standards, they are not anticipated to be extraordinary. The regulation provides a three-year transition period, allowing organisations ample time to adapt their operations and training programmes to meet compliance deadlines.”
Kester Meijer, director operational integrity, compliance and safety – ISCM at KLM Cargo, notes the increasing focus from global authorities on ground handling training, and the training approvals for which airlines (‘operators’) are in fact held responsible from a quality and effectiveness perspective.
“When GHAs are approved under regulations such as (EU) 2025/20-24, their training programmes should also fall under authority oversight relieving the operator from their due diligence,” he says (although airlines remain responsible for flight dispatch, load control and ground supervision, even if they outsource other activities).
Implications for training
The 2026 IATA (International Air Transport Association) Ground Operations Manual (IGOM) and Airport Handling Manual (AHM) include around 1,000 updates based on the new regulations, which will transfer into IATA’s training courses. AHM 1110 covers ground handling training standards specifically.
IATA itself offers training courses for all sorts of roles in the aviation industry, from hands-on airside operations to office-based jobs such as procurement. It also provides bespoke courses covering topics like sustainability or economic issues.
“We have about 600 off-the-shelf products, but there’s a bigger and bigger need for customisation to meet each customer’s specific needs and environment,” says Tanja Schmidt, director IATA Training.
In terms of standards and regulations, however, training tends to be less flexible; compliance is a must, even if the exact process of doing so can vary.
Simon Miles, managing director at Miles Aviation Consultancy, says “it’s easy enough” to ensure training adheres to the latest standards – if one keeps up with developments. But not everyone does, and not everyone has the capability to implement changes.
“The big ground handling suppliers have training infrastructure in place; the smaller ones can struggle, as very few have significant training infrastructure in place. New ground handling regulations require them to have that and I’m not sure if all of them really know what’s coming at them,” he warns.
IATA’s new IGOM and AHM are valid from 1 January 2026 and in order to be compliant, handlers will need to know what the differences are compared with the previous versions. In Miles’ view: “These industry organisations don’t really make it that easy – their updates can be a bit vague. We have a big training portfolio, plus the training manuals we write for people all need to be checked. It’s not difficult, but it is time-consuming. The IGOM changes alone come to nearly 40 pages, and training requirements are five or six pages.”
Pointing out that companies don’t always have the staff available to study and process all that information, he goes on: “This particular [IATA] update is a biggie – possibly because of the ICAO changes coming in next year, and also because IGOM hasn’t been updated in two years so there’s two years’ worth of changes.
“A lot is to do with harmonisation with other standards like those of ICAO; there seems to be a coming together – which is good, because it can be hard when you’re trying to work with competing standards. For instance, IATA’s De-Icing/Anti-Icing Quality Control Pool (DAQCP) audits against standards that aren’t always baselined to SAE standards – which is the baseline standard for de-icing.”
Harmonisation reduces this sort of conflict but is not always straightforward. Within the ground handling field, how ASA is positioning itself against IATA is interesting, Miles observes. “IATA is by the airlines, for the airlines… Where do the ground handlers come into that? That’s perhaps why the ASA has started – as a voice for ground handlers.
“All the standards we operate to in the ground handling world are set by IATA, except de-icing which is SAE. If they’re IATA standards, they’re devised by airlines for airlines essentially, and the handlers have to comply and don’t get an awful lot of say in that, which is a problem because the vast majority of the world’s airlines don’t self-handle.”
Henrik Ambak, an industry enthusiast, adds: “The EASA initiative would probably have been one step more solid if it had been backed by concrete detailed procedure to be adhered to as part of the certification. Such procedures preferably co-developed by airlines and GSPs [ground service providers]… IATA and ASA do you get the hint? IGOM has a possibly great future when finished with the needed level of detail and further not as now being accepted by some airlines with a list of airline-specific variations rendering the standard non-standard from a GSP perspective.
“So, EASA has taken a bold step and with everything new there will be some adjustments to be done by all stakeholders to avoid what nobody wants: a new regulation giving the GSP another certification to achieve and audit scheme to facilitate while airlines keep on doing business as usual…”
Regardless of how regulatory changes come about, and with whose input, handlers must ensure their staff receive the necessary training to ensure compliant and safe operations.
“My task now is to start planning through the changes to the new AHM and IGOM,” says Miles. “Even with changes to the ground handling regulations, not much will change from our perspective, but the big change will be for the ground handlers to make sure they’re compliant. They need to be aware of what they need to do.”
Upskilling
In 2024, over 100,000 students were trained by IATA and its network of partners. The association delivered more than 430 corporate training solutions for over 160 companies, having training 4,800 staff in-house around the world. It offers both instructor-led and self-study courses. While travel/tourism and cargo interest new entrants, safety and dangerous goods training are popular among existing employees.
“Most of the interest is in airport and ground operations training,” Schmidt says. “Passenger handling is popular too, especially with airports expanding. You have new markets, with new employees supposed to flood the aviation industry. From people on the ramp to management, these airports need to attract talent from adjacent industries and upskill them.”
Examples include Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 or India’s big airport projects. Schmidt explains: “It can be difficult to attract aviation talent in new markets so there’s a lot of talent movement. You need to understand which skills are needed, break it down to functions and job roles. Safety management is very important, for instance.
“You also need to know that some things are highly regulated but especially on the management side, there are patterns and people from other industries with relevant skills can upskill to top up their knowledge. For instance, when it comes to ground handling agreements, negotiation is the same process as it would be for any topic.”
It is also worth bearing in mind that new technology can change certain tasks. While it may seem logical to think that staff would automatically be upskilled to use the latest technology, some markets are more traditional and use older procedures and equipment. Others have the power, money and infrastructure to rapidly change how they do business, so they will train their existing and new employees accordingly.
Ideally: “We need to train people in what’s applicable now, but be ready to shift to new tools as they come up,” says Schmidt.
IATA’s training is based on competency – absorbing knowledge and, crucially, putting it into practice. In the past, training tended to be more passive, with an instructor delivering information to participants. Now, there is much more emphasis on opportunities for practice in the classroom (although IATA does also offer online/self-led courses).
“The moment where you need to apply them is the moment when competency and knowledge are tested. We provide a safe environment in which people can see the consequences of their actions,” Schmidt says.
Miles Aviation Consultancy also focuses on the practical, providing almost exclusively classroom-based training with onsite practical training.
“We do get requests for, for example, an online version of our load control/load master training,” Miles says. “This is a five-day course, and if we did it online, we’d need seven or eight days. It’s not feasible to ask people to sit in front of a Teams meeting for six or seven hours a day, for seven days. Plus, the practical exercises are difficult to do online and I haven’t yet seen a platform that could make this work.”
There are also questions of equipment availability and a suitable environment in which to learn – “so we pretty much still do it the old-fashioned way. It’s only really management courses that we do online.”
The most popular courses Miles Aviation Consultancy covers are specialist subjects, for which the training expertise is not common. One of the things that may be driving this is that during Covid ground handlers and airlines divested themselves of many of their staff – and with them, a great deal of experience.
“When the industry reopened at the end of that period, we had a situation where some people were not coming back – we had lost them permanently as an industry. We’re still rebuilding from that. People that have come in since then have had two to three years of gaining experience, but the industry is still not quite what it was pre-Covid,” Miles feels.
His company is very busy with de-icing, which because it is seasonal, is rather specialist and which is subject to a requirement for annual refresher training. Pushback towing training is another specialist and time-consuming course that is proving popular.
“We’re also seeing demand for load control/load master courses, which require quite specialist knowledge; there aren’t that many instructors who have that experience,” Miles adds.
New technologies
In July, Lufthansa Cargo launched the development of a new type of virtual reality (VR) training for aircraft loading supervisors.
The airline says this training is designed to prepare employees for their aircraft handling tasks in a realistic manner – flexibly, safely and independently of operational requirements.
“Processes, safety regulations and communication can be practised intensively in a virtual environment. The immersive nature of VR technology allows learning content to be conveyed more intensively and promotes a lasting practical understanding of the processes. In addition, learning content is internalised much more quickly, as training participants can focus better on the content,” a statement outlines.
The rollout of the first module of the training was scheduled for October 2025.
But Miles remains somewhat unconvinced of the practicalities of using VR in training.
He says the technology is “great – especially if you’re familiar with gaming”, as many of the younger generation are. The problem is the cost of the infrastructure, plus the amount of equipment that must be moved to the training site and set up. And as things stand, it is only possible to train one person at a time using VR.
He feels VR would work better as an add-on to courses, in a format that would allow attendees to “plug in and get on with it by themselves”, rather than trying to use it to train a group of people.
As for artificial intelligence (AI), Miles warns that removing humans from training could result in the loss of the lived experience that is such a valuable part of passing on skills and knowledge.
“If you go down the AI route eventually you’ll be totally reliant on AI to produce your training courses and maybe even deliver them, and the human element will disappear. That’s a slippery slope,” he says.
While AI can be useful for some tasks, such as spellchecking the text of a training manual, when it comes to anything technical the results can still be “error-strewn”. Plus, Miles continues: “Some things are firewalled/paywalled too so AI can’t always give you much of an answer. You have to feed it with data, and then it can do analysis. But it can’t do the core technical stuff.”
Nor is AI capable of filling the “knowledge gap” that persists since the large-scale exodus of talent from the industry during Covid.
In Schmidt’s view, the most important thing to understand besides regulatory and compliance needs is how to help companies onboard new staff quickly and help those individuals be proficient in their roles.
“For instance, ground handlers have high attrition and find it hard to attract new staff. How can we help them deal with that most efficiently? What skills do they need, and how can those skills best be built up? We have to take a very tailored approach, understand their true needs and create training that sticks using simulations and hands-on exercises. We need to build competency, so employees feel safe to practise without fear before they’re released into operational roles,” she says.
IATA is also working with airports and handlers on some new projects and a pilot for 2026 and beyond. It wants to develop “smaller pieces of learning” that are very targeted, instead of broader training that requires staff to spend three to five days in the classroom – a length of time that is not always feasible.
Ultimately, the goal is to ensure safe and compliant operations in the airside environment. Regulatory changes are just one aspect to consider among many.
