Garuda Indonesia

Garuda Indonesia is the flag carrier of Indonesia and a member of SkyTeam, operating from its hub at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport outside Jakarta. Its fleet spans Boeing 737s on the domestic network with Airbus A330s and Boeing 777s on regional and long-haul routes, and the group also owns the low-cost carrier Citilink. State-controlled and serving the world's largest archipelago, it flies a network shaped by geography as much as by demand.

Flying for Garuda Indonesia

Garuda's cockpit career path is unusually explicit about its stages. Cadets enter a programme of roughly 18 to 24 months covering theory, simulator work and flight hours, with a TOEIC score of 600 required at entry. Graduates then serve as Second Officers — relief pilots on widebody sectors — before progressing to First Officer as an operating co-pilot. Direct-entry First Officers are recruited separately and need to be at least 24 years old with around 2,000 hours logged.

Selection takes two to three months and moves through administrative screening, interviews, a medical examination, English testing, a psychological evaluation and a simulator assessment. The psychological and aptitude stage carries real weight in Indonesian airline selection, and it is worth arriving fluent in the format of reasoning, memory and multitasking tests rather than meeting them cold.