A week or so ago I was talking with a friend at a flight training provider and we were discussing the challenges many flight training providers are experiencing at sourcing new employee CFIs as airline hiring has actively hired away as many CFIs as can meet ATP (or R-ATP) experience requirements. In some cases, I have been talking with flight training providers that are finding their operations losing more CFIs per month than they can hire.
It got me thinking, will we be experiencing a reduction in training throughput due to a lack of available CFI resources to train the following sequence of pilots? My gut said this might be a real possibility.
That was until I pulled some data from a source that reports the number of CFI certificates issued per month for U.S. and non-U.S. citizens. I took a little time, and put this into a quick table to see what the trend actually looked like, and here is what I came up with.
It appears in fact that we are producing MORE CFIs per month recently than we were over the past years. Continue reading