Aviation Australia

Aviation Australia is a Queensland Government-owned training provider established in 2001, with its main campus beside Brisbane International Airport and further campuses in Cairns, Melbourne and Perth plus an international college in Riyadh. Its Brisbane site houses a Technical Training Centre and a Flight Safety Training Centre with live aircraft and a Boeing 737 simulator. Aircraft maintenance engineering is its largest business — it is the only Australian VET provider holding both domestic and international basic engineering accreditations — alongside cabin crew, remote pilot and flight crew training.

Training at Aviation Australia

On the pilot side it delivers Commercial Pilot Licence theory, instrument rating, multi-crew cooperation and pilot-in-command courses rather than a sponsored airline cadetship, so it suits candidates building a licence and the multi-crew credentials airlines ask for. It is also an examination venue, running CASA and EASA regulatory examinations in Brisbane, Cairns, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide, and it hosts airline selection days — Virgin Australia's pilot assessment day is held at its Brisbane campus.

Unusually for a training provider, it sells the assessment itself. Its Pilot Aptitude Assessment runs the COMPASS computer-based battery alongside the Checklist Professional Profile personality inventory, aimed at candidates with no flying experience or fewer than about 100 hours. The Advanced version, for licence holders and pilots past roughly 100 hours, adds mathematics, memory, instrument interpretation and task management modules plus an ATPL-level operational knowledge test. Those are precisely the constructs airline selection measures, so sitting one is a realistic dry run — and practising the underlying skills first is what makes the result worth having.