The DLR test is the pilot aptitude screening run by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) and is the gateway to a cockpit career across the Lufthansa Group. If you want to train through the European Flight Academy — the group's cadet school feeding Lufthansa, SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Eurowings, Discover Airlines and Lufthansa City Airlines — a DLR certificate is the first hurdle. Austrian's Future Pilots route requires it as well, and SWISS accepts a Swiss SPHAIR recommendation as an alternative.
How the selection is structured
Selection runs in two stages. The first is a single day of computer-based group testing at a DLR test centre — historically commissioned by airlines as the BU (Berufsgrunduntersuchung), and today booked by most candidates themselves as the DLR-Zertifikat examination. In Hamburg the day runs from 08:00 to around 17:00, with short breaks between subtests and a lunch break; DLR runs its own certificate examinations in Hamburg and, from October 2026, Vienna, while test days on the Lufthansa Group route are also held in Zurich and Milan. The day measures cognitive ability, memory, spatial orientation, attention, technical comprehension, English and psychomotor coordination.
The second stage depends on your route. Cadet applicants to the European Flight Academy take their certificate into 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 instead, a two-day assessment covered later in this course. The certificate itself exists because EASA requires operators above a certain size to assess the mental abilities and psychological characteristics of cockpit crew before hiring — binding since February 2021 — and a DLR-Zertifikat is proof of exactly such an examination.
Since the switch to the DLR-Zertifikat system there is no simple pass/fail on the test day: every candidate receives a graded certificate (A to D), and the European Flight Academy applies minimum grades for admission. Competition across the full selection is fierce — historically roughly one in five candidates cleared the first stage and roughly one in five of those cleared the second, putting the overall rate around five percent — and the process has historically been conducted in German. The next lesson covers the practical side: cost, booking, grading and retakes.
How this course works
The following lessons break the selection into its pillars — the certificate practicalities, cognitive testing, psychomotor testing, and the assessment centre — with concrete preparation strategies for each. Pair the theory with regular sessions on the practice games on this platform: the DLR rewards trained, consistent performance far more than raw talent on the day.