A continued climb in the number of CFI certificates issued in 2024 was the aberration in pilot certification numbers. With most other certificates and ratings decreasing slightly, the issuance of CFI certificates again climbed slightly to the highest number we have seen in a year since 1990.

The issuance of CFI certificates each year gives us a perspective on how many pilots will be able to gain experience as CFIs in the upcoming years that will be applicable to meeting ATP minimums at a future point in their career.

This is also an indicator of how many flight instructors are being generated each year that can train our next generations of pilots as other CFIs transition out of service in flight instruction positions.

We can also see from the table, and from the chart below, that our average age of CFI certificate holders is decreasing as we heavily populate our incoming CFI certificate holders with younger generation CFIs. Even though our overall CFI certificates held population continues to grow, topping out at 138,127 at the end of 2024, the heavy influx of new CFI populations is going to trend younger, especially as our older generation of CFIs passes away.

We can see from the next chart that the percentage of our CFI population that is over the age of 65, and over the age of 70 continues to grow as a percentage of the overall CFI population. According to CDC data, the average age of men, of which most older CFIs are, is 76 years of age at this point. If we assume this holds, we have to assume that about 20% of our CFIs will reach that average age of death within the next 11 years. This will generate a significant dropoff in the number of CFI certificates held by our older sectors of the pilot population and the heavy influx we have had of younger CFIs in recent years will make the age demographic of our CFI population trend even lower as a percentage of the total.

We have made some changes to our CFI certificate data points at the end of 2024, specifically that CFI certificates will no longer expire going forward. They will just need to be kept “current” and a CFI will have to meet recency requirements to be eligible to use those now non-expiring certificates. Going forward, we will likely have to make some adjustments to this data point and look, if the data is available, at CFI certificates that are within “recency” to compare this data point. It is also unclear at this point how or when the FAA will “remove a CFI from the data calculations, assuming they have passed away. More to come as we dig for more data and look to future years.