Seneca Polytechnic School of Aviation

Seneca Polytechnic's School of Aviation is one of Canada's longest-established flight training providers, teaching pilots since 1968 — first at Buttonville Airport and, since 2014, from a purpose-built campus at Peterborough Airport in Ontario. Its Honours Bachelor of Aviation Technology pairs a four-year degree with Canada's first Transport Canada-approved integrated Airline Transport Pilot programme, giving it a distinctive standing among the country's collegiate flight schools.

Training at Seneca Polytechnic School of Aviation

Degree students complete their first year of classroom study at the Newnham Campus in Toronto before moving to Peterborough, where academic work and flight training are co-located, and a pathway launched with Confederation College in 2025 lets students complete their first year of flight training at Thunder Bay's Aviation Centre of Excellence. The school's flagship airline link is the Jazz Cadet Partnership: qualified third-year degree students are offered an interview with Jazz Aviation, and successful candidates train as Jazz cadets in their final year with direct entry into the airline's hiring pool — a route that connects onward to Air Canada through Jazz's established flow-through. Seneca also developed the Jazz Approach cadet programme with CAE and Jazz, hosting its integrated ATPL training at Peterborough.

Places are heavily contested, with hundreds of applications each year for a limited intake, and progression into the cadet streams depends on academic results, flight training performance and airline interviews, with CAE and Jazz applying airline-defined selection criteria to cadet candidates. For anyone targeting a cadetship and the airline career beyond it, disciplined preparation for computer-based aptitude and psychometric testing is one of the smartest investments to make before selection day.