Cathay Pacific

Cathay Pacific is Hong Kong's flag carrier, working a single hub at Hong Kong International with an all-widebody passenger fleet of Airbus A350s and A330s and Boeing 777-300ERs, supplemented by A320neo-family jets on regional routes and a substantial 747 freighter operation. A founding member of oneworld, it absorbed its regional arm Cathay Dragon in 2020 and owns the low-cost carrier HK Express. Its position at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta makes it one of the great connecting airlines between Asia, Europe and North America.

Flying for Cathay Pacific

The Cadet Pilot Programme is Cathay's sponsored ab-initio route and runs about eighty weeks from zero experience to a commercial pilot licence, with ground training in Hong Kong and elsewhere and flying at established training organisations in the United States or Australia. Graduates join the airline as Second Officers and progress onto regional, long-haul and ultra-long-haul flying. The academic bar is a secondary education with good passes in mathematics and science, a degree, or passes in all ATPL subjects, together with the right to live and work in Hong Kong or mainland China and a Hong Kong CAD Class 1 medical. Applications stay open year-round, and the airline also recruits qualified direct-entry pilots.

Selection is four stages and unusually front-loaded with testing. Stage one alone combines COMPASS aptitude testing with a reasoning test, a job-knowledge test and an interview; stage two adds a further aptitude test, and the final stage brings pilot-specific computer-based testing on top of a group exercise, a flight-planning assessment and more interviews. Very few airline processes put a psychomotor battery in the very first sitting alongside everything else, and it means an unprepared candidate can be finished before they have said a word about why they want to fly.