ENAC – École Nationale de l'Aviation Civile

ENAC – École Nationale de l'Aviation Civile is France's state aviation university, founded in 1949 and based in Toulouse since 1968, operating under the French civil aviation authority (DGAC) with flight training delivered to EASA standards. With a fleet of more than a hundred aircraft spread across its national network of training centres, it is one of Europe's largest aviation universities, and its élève pilote de ligne (EPL) programme has been training France's airline pilots — tuition-free — for over five decades.

Training at ENAC

The EPL programme takes cadets from ATPL theory at the Toulouse campus through roughly sixteen months of flying at ENAC's own centres at Muret, Carcassonne, Montpellier and Saint-Yan, finishing with CPL, multi-engine instrument rating and MCC in around two years. In 2018 Air France chose ENAC to select and train its cadet pilots, and the Toulouse campus still hosts the PSY1 test day of the Air France Cadets selection, underlining the school's position at the heart of the French airline pipeline.

Entry to the EPL is by one of France's most competitive selection processes: eliminatory written exams in mathematics, physics and English are followed by the PSY1 psychometric and psychomotor test day, the PSY2 stage of group exercises and interviews before a panel including a pilot and a psychologist, an English oral and a medical — with only around fourteen EPL/S places for well over a thousand applicants in recent years. At those odds, disciplined preparation for the psychometric and aptitude stages is not optional but essential for anyone serious about a place.