What follows the computer-based stage depends on your route. Cadet applicants to the European Flight Academy face an assessment centre run by Interpersonal GmbH in Hamburg — or, on the SWISS route, the Flight Crew Assessment Center in Zurich — with group exercises and interviews held together with the airline. Licensed direct-entry pilots face the DLR-run Firmenqualifikation: two days in Hamburg, with group exercises and role-plays on the first day — including a cooperative planning task in which two candidates, seated apart, coordinate vehicle routing by radio under time pressure and surprise status updates — and a flight-simulator check plus a board interview with DLR psychologists and airline representatives on the second. Whichever form it takes, the same qualities are being watched.
What is assessed
Group exercises: planning tasks solved with other candidates, observed for teamwork, communication and decision-making — the assessors care how you work, not just whether you finish.
Personality questionnaires: standardised inventories checked for consistency against how you actually behave in the exercises and interviews.
Interviews: motivation, biography and competency questions, often probing how you handle mistakes, conflict and pressure.
Simulator check (direct entry): basic handling under instruction — assessors watch how you take corrections, share attention and manage rising stress, not whether you fly perfectly.
How to prepare
Prepare concrete examples from your own life for the classic competencies — teamwork, leadership, handling failure — and practise telling them briefly and honestly. In group exercises, aim to be the candidate who structures the discussion and brings quieter members in, not the one who dominates. And stay consistent: the questionnaires, exercises and interviews are cross-checked, so an acted personality is usually found out. On the practice page, the Big Five test shows you your own trait profile before a psychologist reads it, and the Biographical Inventory familiarises you with the biographical-questionnaire format while turning your own history into ready interview material. Authentic, prepared and calm wins this stage.