airBaltic Pilot Academy

airBaltic Pilot Academy is the airline-owned training arm of airBaltic, based in Riga with flying delivered from Liepāja on Latvia's Baltic coast. It exists for one purpose: to fill the right-hand seat of airBaltic's all-Airbus A220-300 fleet, which makes it one of the few European academies where the training programme and the employer are the same organisation. Its January 2026 class of seventeen cadets came from ten different countries, so the intake is genuinely pan-European rather than Latvian.

Training at airBaltic Pilot Academy

The integrated ATPL programme develops a frozen EASA licence over roughly eighteen months with no prior aviation experience required, and its defining feature is a work-study model that few schools attempt. After passing the ATPL theory examinations in phase one, cadets are formally hired as airBaltic employees and then alternate two weeks of flight training at Liepāja with two weeks of paid work at the airline's Riga headquarters — so cadets are inside the company, drawing a salary, long before they reach a flight deck. Fees are reported in the region of €89,000, and a pilot job is guaranteed from the moment of selection. Intakes run periodically; the cadet track was closed for applications through 2026 while the airline reviewed future course plans.

Selection reflects that guarantee: it is airline pilot recruitment, run before training rather than after. The process combines computer-based aptitude and psychometric testing with mathematics and physics screening, interviews and a skills assessment. Because a place carries an employment contract with it, the standard applied at the aptitude stage is the airline's rather than a flight school's — which makes practising that kind of battery before an application window opens one of the more consequential things a candidate can do.