Korean Air

Korean Air is South Korea's flag carrier, working a hub at Incheon alongside domestic operations from Gimpo, with a fleet of Boeing 787s and 777s, Airbus A330s and A220-300s and one of the largest dedicated freighter operations of any passenger airline. A founding member of SkyTeam in 2000, it also owns the low-cost carrier Jin Air. Its acquisition of Asiana Airlines completed in December 2024, and the two carriers are being integrated into a single airline with the Asiana brand retired — a consolidation that reshapes the entire Korean pilot market.

Flying for Korean Air

Korean Air trains and hires largely from within Korea, and it runs its own flight training centre with an ab-initio base at Jeongseok Airfield on Jeju, feeding cadets toward a first officer seat alongside recruitment of already-licensed pilots. Hiring standards are notably higher than the market around it: the airline has typically looked for around 1,000 flight hours in a first officer where Asiana accepted 300, and that gap has become the crux of a seniority dispute between the two pilot groups as integration approaches. Recruitment was under review through the merger, with applications being processed in anticipation of a resumption.

Selection follows the Korean pattern of layered screening: aptitude and psychometric testing, technical and English-language assessment, simulator evaluation and a series of interviews, with medical standards applied strictly. The airline publishes no test brand. What its process shares with every other major carrier is a computer-based stage that measures spatial reasoning, numerical work, multitasking and reaction under time pressure before a human being assesses anything — and with the merged airline's hour requirements likely to stay high, arriving fluent in those test formats is one of the few levers a candidate controls.