With a forecast of a week of lousy flying weather ahead, it was a calm evening before the storm to take advantage of for a little night currency with Charlie. It didn’t take long for this, the second flight after a return from her annual in mid-March.
Always getting later in the summer, the opportunity to reset a night tailwheel currency (and ASEL) is a little more palatable to me the older I get when it is at 9pm instead of 11pm or later in the middle of the summer up here! Continue reading
One of the data points that stuck out to me this year in the U.S. Civil Airman Statistics relates to a continued jump in pass rates on initial CFI practical tests. A test for a certificate that has historically been rumored to have exceedingly high initial test failure rates, the numbers over the past few years have been improving.
We can see from the data (as I have compiled it from multiple years of FAA reporting) that the pass rate remained very stable over the past couple of decades, hovering near the 68-69% range for most of those years.
Since 2019, that rate has been climbing.
In fact, the pass rate has increased nearly 10% on average over the past three years.
I can’t help but be curious, why?
Jokingly, I was talking about this with a colleague and said, “must be the DPEs are all getting easier.” He responded, “how do we know it isn’t just flight training has improved?”
I guess, it could be either. But it could also be something else all together. IN fact, the timing of the improvement in the pass rates correlates closely with another potential explanation.
I like looking at pilot certificate data. Those of you that read this blog probably already know this. But what about mechanics?
Airplanes don’t fly, at least for long periods of time without mechanical attention. Our pilot population is aging, declining, and changing; so is our mechanic population.
A starting point might be to look at the total number of “mechanic certificates held” as a measure of how many are out there.
The graph below shows some data here that does indicate that in a general sense we have less mechanic certificates held now than we did going back to 1999. We are somewhere around 30,000 less mechanic certificates held than at that time.
This chart however in some ways drives more questions than it answers. Sure, if we look at 1999 and 2021 comparatively we see that there are less certificates held in 2021. But we also see some big dips and then climb backs of numbers of certificates held. Certification process seems to be the explanation for the big drops (changing in timing and process for maintaining IA certificates – that require renewal). So, the gist is that isn’t as big a worry as the chart might initially indicate, but anytime we see a bunch of people drop out of certificate, even for administrative reasons, it generally results in less of them “becoming recurrent” again. Continue reading
Each year that the FAA releases statistical data on U.S. airmen certification efforts, I, and probably a very small number of other people in our industry get excited. We dork out over the data and try to parse it in ways that help us understand trends in our industry. If we can understand some of this data, it helps us understand what is happening in our pilot production pipeline.
The yearly data came out about a week ago, earlier than most years, and I have spent the last few days playing with the data and putting it into my own spreadsheets where I track some of the trends. Each year I do this, I like to share some of the data points I think might be interesting to others in the training sector of aviation. So, with that, let’s check out some of the data and trends I noted.
Overall Pilot Certificate/Rating Production Remains Strong
Even with many of the challenges we all have experienced in the past two years, overall pilot certificate production remains strong.
When we look at specific ratings, the primary ones being for Private Pilot, Instrument Ratings, and Commercial Pilot certifications, we see these specific ratings are still continuing to have relatively strong numbers of certificate issuances. In fact, pre-COVID numbers were actually lower than we saw even during COVID restriction affected time periods.
