Virgin Australia’s Advanced Pilot Cadets will today celebrate their graduation, after an extensive 22-week course conducted at Flight Training Adelaide in South Australia.

The group have all secured flying positions with Virgin Australia and will now move onto the ATR 72 and Boeing 777 aircraft types.

Director of Group Flight Operations, Stuart Aggs said: “For the first time in our program’s history, we conducted both advanced and ab initio  pilot cadetships simultaneously, designed to widen the opportunities for our cadetship program. I’m very pleased that our 2017 class of advanced cadets will now take to the skies as certified First and Second Officers.

“Our ab initio course is still underway with those cadets due to graduate in November and we look forward to them joining our pilot group,” Mr Aggs said.

Graduating cadet Brendan Swale said: “Becoming a pilot was a rather drastic career change for me, having previously worked in sales and marketing. The Virgin Australia Advanced Pilot Cadetship provided the perfect opportunity for me to have my existing flying hours recognised, before completing the course at Flight Training Adelaide.

“I will now move onto the ATR fleet as a First Officer and I look forward to working alongside the rest of the pilot group at Virgin Australia.”

Throughout their course, the cadets have been training on a number of different aircraft types, including a Diamond DA40, Diamond DA42 Twinstar and Mudry CAP 10 aircraft.

Virgin Australia has been running its pilot cadetship in conjunction with Flight Training Adelaide since 2012. Applications for the 2018 course will open in October.