ATP certificate issuance decreased again in 2025, dropping further from the 2024 numbers and a high point in recent years in 2023.

As final certificate issuance numbers from 2025 come in, we see a total ATP AMEL certificates issued in 2025 coming in at 7593 certificates.

This is a decrease again from 2024 of 18.9% and a drop compared with our recent high point in 2023 by 31.5%.

This should not surprise us when we consider that we saw decreased airline hiring.

As airline hiring dipped in the past two years from higher points in the post-COVID years of 2022 and 2023, fewer pilots were hired into regional airlines. As that hiring tapered off in 2024 and 2025, pilots were not transitioning through initial training courses at regional airlines where they typically complete an ATP CTP course, a type rating, and their ATP (including R-ATP) certification.

While the 2025 numbers are a dip from high points, they still represent higher numbers of ATP certification happening than were experienced going backward from 2022 through nearly all of the years back to 2007.

We can see that in the following chart, where we see that the number of certificates issued still trends up on a yearly basis over the past nearly 20 years.

We continued to also see that the percentage of ATP certificates that are issued remains around the 30% range in the past few years. Dipping a little in 2025, this is still an indicator that about 30% of our pilots who get ATP certificates each year are doing so at the Restricted ATP (R-ATP) level initially after having qualified for the reduced hours option by training in a collegiate aviation program.

This option first became possible after 2013 and we can see that by 2017 these programs had come fully online in their production of a stable percentage of the pilots who qualify for their subsequent ATP certficaites each year. These pilots are entering into service as airline pilots (First Officers) with less than the full ATP certificate experience requirements of 1500 hours total flight experience.