43 Air School

43 Air School is Africa's largest flight training establishment, based on a purpose-built campus at Port Alfred on South Africa's Eastern Cape coast with further operations at Bhisho and Lanseria. Re-established in 1988, it has trained more than 6,000 pilots and now runs a fleet of over 70 aircraft with some 250 full-time staff, around seventy of them flight and ground instructors. The Port Alfred campus is fully residential and holds an average of about 300 cadets at a time, with multiple runways to absorb the traffic that fleet generates.

Training at 43 Air School

The school's core offering is integrated airline pilot training, taking cadets from no experience through to a commercial pilot licence with the ratings and theory an airline career requires, in a single streamlined programme. Its scale, its year-round flying weather and its cost base have made it a destination for airline cadet schemes from outside South Africa as well as for local students: it has trained IndiGo cadets in numbers through an Indian partner, and it appears on the international partner lists of several airline programmes. Graduates go on to apply to carriers in South Africa and abroad.

Entry runs on course prerequisites, medical and academic requirements rather than a European-style cadet aptitude battery. The school does, however, administer COMPASS itself — the aviation aptitude battery, alongside aviation English, verbal reasoning and a professional-profile psychometric — offering it to prospective students as well as to airline and flight-school clients, though it does not state it as a mandatory gate. That is worth knowing in both directions: a candidate can sit a real airline-grade battery here before committing to training, and the airlines they later apply to will run something very like it.