Hello from Flight School Wingman! Cadetship and sponsorship schemes are one of the most sought-after routes into a flying career, and with good reason. They’re also highly competitive, with far more applicants than places, so understanding what’s involved and preparing properly can make a real difference. Airlines and providers each

Understanding Pilot Aptitude Testing Pilot aptitude tests are a feature of almost every route into flying, whether you’re applying to a flight school, a cadetship, a sponsorship scheme or the military. They’re designed to assess your underlying cognitive and psychomotor abilities rather than what you know, so they can feel

Becoming a pilot is a dream shared by many, and for most people the single biggest hurdle is paying for it. Flight training is a substantial investment, and how you fund it deserves as much thought as where you train. Here are some of the routes people take, and why

This article was written for Flight School Wingman by James, sharing his personal experience of integrated flight training. The views are his own. Costs, timescales and industry conditions described were accurate at the time of writing and will have changed since. Everyone’s route into aviation is different, and individual outcomes

Deciding to train as a pilot is exciting, and choosing where to train is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make. Glossy brochures and slick marketing can be persuasive, but they tell you very little about what training there is actually like. The best defence is knowing what to ask.

Charter airlines are often described as the transport arm of the holiday industry, flying holidaymakers to sun-soaked destinations across Europe and beyond. For many pilots it’s a first airline job, and it can be a genuinely enjoyable one. But it also runs to a rhythm quite unlike other parts of

The dream usually starts with the image: the uniform, the flight deck at sunrise, the layover photo from somewhere warm. It’s a powerful picture, and there’s real truth in it. But it’s a small part of the job, and it tells you almost nothing about what actually makes someone good

Flight training is one of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do, and one of the hardest. Most people arrive expecting the highs and are caught off guard by the lows, so it’s worth knowing what both look like before you start. The Highs: Your first solo. There’s nothing quite

Aviation has long drawn from a fairly narrow demographic, and women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds remain underrepresented on flight decks. That picture is slowly changing, and airlines, flight schools and industry bodies have put real effort into widening access in recent years. For an aspiring pilot, this matters

Airline cadetship and sponsorship schemes are among the most sought-after routes into a flying career, and competition for places is genuinely fierce. A single scheme can attract thousands of applications for a handful of places. The good news is that a great many of those applications are weak, rushed or

By Andrew Neofytou, Founder of Flight School Wingman Ask ten pilots whether they’d rather fly short haul or long haul and you’ll get ten different answers, usually delivered with some force. Having spent a good deal of my career on short haul, here’s an honest look at what the job