Widerøe

Widerøe is Scandinavia's largest regional airline, headquartered in Bodø and flying De Havilland Dash 8 turboprops and Embraer E190-E2 jets across Norway's short-field regional network alongside routes to the rest of Scandinavia and Europe. Much of its flying serves the short runways of coastal and northern Norway on public service contracts, a demanding operation with few equivalents in Europe.

Flying for Widerøe

Widerøe does not run a traditional in-house cadet scheme. It hires pilots who already hold a valid EASA licence — typically a CPL with instrument and multi-engine ratings and a frozen ATPL, or a full ATPL — and works with OSM Aviation Academy on the training side. All newly hired pilots start as First Officers regardless of previous experience, and First Officer vacancies are posted through the airline's own job board with fixed application deadlines rather than a rolling process.

The decisive requirement is linguistic and geographic rather than technical: candidates need to understand Norwegian and speak one of the Scandinavian languages, and a class 1 medical issued by a Scandinavian authority. For a candidate who fits that profile the airline is a realistic target; for one who does not, no amount of aptitude preparation will bridge it — which is worth knowing before investing in an application.