Civil Aviation Flight University of China

The Civil Aviation Flight University of China is the largest flight training institution in the world. Headquartered at Guanghan in Sichuan, it runs five of its own airports — Guanghan, Suining, Mianyang, Xinjin and Luoyang — across seven campuses covering flight technology, air traffic control, aviation engineering, transport management and cabin operations, with more than 8,000 full-time students and a fleet of over 200 aircraft. It exists to supply China's airlines with pilots at national scale, and a very large share of the country's airline flight decks passed through it.

Training at CAFUC

CAFUC delivers full-process ab-initio training, taking cadets from zero experience through the licences required for an airline first officer role, combining classroom theory, simulator work and flight hours spread across its network of training airfields. Most cadets are recruited for or sponsored by Chinese carriers before they arrive, so the university functions as the training stage of an airline pipeline rather than as an open-market flight school. It maintains partnerships with manufacturers and airlines to keep the syllabus aligned with what the carriers actually need.

Entry runs through 招飞初选, the national cadet screening: a comprehensive interview, surgical and medical screening, an English test, and the pilot aptitude test — 飞行员职业能力测试, the civil aviation regulator's own national platform, which CAFUC and its peer universities have required since the 2024/25 intake. A separate flight-career psychological screening organised by the regulator sits inside the medical stage. Two things make this unusually unforgiving: both tests are set by the CAAC rather than by the university, so they apply identically across the major Chinese airline pipelines, and the aptitude test can normally be sat only once a year with no retake. There is no second attempt to learn from.