Japan Airlines

Japan Airlines is one of Japan's two full-service majors, flying from Tokyo's Haneda and Narita airports across a dense domestic network and long-haul routes to Asia, the Americas and Europe. Its fleet centres on the Airbus A350-900 and A350-1000 and Boeing 787, 777 and 767 widebodies with 737s on domestic and regional sectors, and the group also runs the low-cost carriers ZIPAIR and Spring Japan. A member of oneworld, JAL rebuilt itself after a 2010 bankruptcy into one of the industry's most punctual and financially disciplined carriers.

Flying for Japan Airlines

JAL's principal route to the flight deck is 自社養成 — in-house cadet training, in which the airline hires candidates with no flying experience as trainees and puts them through the whole licence from scratch. Most successful applicants come through the early-selection cycle rather than the standard graduate round, and that route requires attending a one-day company internship in the summer or autumn term before an application is even possible. The airline also recruits qualified first officers directly, and JAL's regional subsidiary J-AIR runs its own trainee stream.

The cadet process runs to eight stages and is longer than almost any other airline's. It opens with document screening and the SPI general-ability test at a test centre, moves through two online interviews and the internship, then to a psychological aptitude test and an English conversation test at the JAL First Technical Center, and then to the flight aptitude examination itself — JAL's own, not a commercial pilot battery — followed by two separate medicals and a final interview. Each stage is a cut, and the aptitude testing sits early enough that most candidates never reach the interviews that decide the rest.