All Nippon Airways (ANA)

All Nippon Airways is Japan's largest airline by passengers, operating from Tokyo Haneda and Narita with the world's largest Boeing 787 fleet alongside 777s, 767s and the Airbus A320neo family, plus a handful of A380s kept for the Honolulu route. A member of Star Alliance, the ANA Group also owns the low-cost carrier Peach, the regional operator ANA Wings and the medium-haul LCC AirJapan. It has built its network around Haneda's proximity to central Tokyo and a long-running strategy of premium domestic connectivity feeding international routes.

Flying for ANA

ANA brings most new pilots in through its own cadet scheme, hiring candidates with no flying background and training them to airline standard, alongside direct-entry recruitment for qualified first officers. What makes the group unusual is that selection is shared: passing its entrance test feeds cadet selection not only at ANA but also at ANA Wings, at Peach and at partner carrier AIRDO, so one process opens several doors at once. The group's scale means intakes are steady rather than sporadic.

That shared entrance test is FCAT, the ANA Group Common Pilot Aptitude Test, run by the group itself rather than by an outside vendor. It is roughly an hour of computer-based aviation-aptitude and psychological testing covering spatial awareness, control inputs, multitasking, reaction time, arithmetic and observation, and it sits alongside document screening, group work, interviews, the GTEC English test and a medical. An hour is not long, and the components are all trainable — spatial rotation, mental arithmetic under load, tracking while monitoring — which makes FCAT one of the clearest cases anywhere for practising before you sit rather than after.