The SAAIR Safety Assessment Aviation test set assesses aspects of personality and cognitive ability that are relevant to aviation. It measures criteria such as stress tolerance, memory, spatial ability and psychomotor coordination as well as personality aspects such as conscientiousness or emotional stability. The majority of the dimensions have been validated in terms of their ability to predict success in a flight simulator test. The tests used have been shown to meet the highest psychometric standards.

SAAIR is tailored to the needs of civil and military aviation and covers three areas: selection of civil and military pilots, pre-selecting candidates for testing in a flight simulator, and regular testing of pilots’ fitness to fly. SAAIR can be used to select pilots of all types, such as aircraft pilots, sports aircraft pilots, helicopter pilots and airship pilots.

It can reduce not only the institutional burden of the selection process but also the burden on pilots and would-be pilots in terms of both time and physical and mental stress. A generally high level of ability in all relevant areas can be regarded as a basic condition for coping successfully with the cognitive demands placed on pilots.

In modern aviation it is not only sensomotor skills that matter: other abilities such as logical reasoning, numerical ability, spatial ability and focused attention are acquiring an increasingly important role. This has been confirmed in various metaanalyses of the predictive validity of cognitive ability dimensions in pilot selection and training. Likewise, some aspects of this are reflected in the JAR-FCL3 guidelines, subparts A, B and C section 2. The tests for this test set were selected on the basis of these considerations, various studies and of expert valuation. The relevance of the test set to the prediction of the training outcomes or flying performance of aspiring pilots in both civil and military aviation was evaluated empirically.