Air India

Air India returned to the Tata Group in 2022 after seven decades in state hands, and has since absorbed Vistara and been rebuilt around hubs at Delhi and Mumbai. It flies Boeing 787s and 777s and Airbus A350-900s long-haul with a large A320neo-family narrowbody fleet beneath them, backed by one of the biggest aircraft orders ever placed — around 470 jets committed in 2023 and more since. A Star Alliance member with the low-cost arm Air India Express alongside it, the group is expanding fast enough that pilot supply has become a strategic problem in its own right.

Flying for Air India

Air India's answer to that problem is to build its own supply. The Air India Flying Training Academy at Amravati in Maharashtra opened in FY2026 with 34 aircraft and more than thirty instructors on a residential campus, designed to graduate around 180 commercial pilots a year — intended as the largest flying training hub in South Asia. The Cadet Pilot Program runs roughly 26 months end to end, with eighteen months on campus split between ground school and flight training before licence issue, ATPL ground school and a type rating; CPL training is delivered at Amravati or at partner academies in the United States, AeroGuard among them. It is self-funded, with fees reported in the region of ₹1 to 1.25 crore. The group also recruits trainee and direct-entry first officers.

Selection runs in four stages: online application, a technical evaluation covering critical thinking, numerical reasoning, motor skills and spatial awareness, a non-technical evaluation of group exercises and panel interviews, and finally entry to the programme. Air India describes the online stage only as assessing cognitive and behavioural skills; candidate accounts consistently identify it as the Aon battery. Eligibility is academic — 60% overall at 10+2 and 60% in each of English, mathematics and physics, with the age band closing at 30 — so among applicants who clear that bar, the technical evaluation is what actually decides the intake.