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Checkride scheduling continues to be something many lament, having a hard time finding an available DPE to complete a practical test in some areas. A factor in that demand structure is how many practical tests DPEs are conducting each year and how many DPEs are available to do so.

The chart table here shows us how many DPEs we had at the ending point of each year, and how many DPE initial or add-on certification events were conducted by DPEs in each year.

We can see from the data that going back to 2011, DPEs were in demand for many fewer practical test activities per year. In fact, in the past few years, DPEs have been doing more than double the number of practical tests per year than they were doing in the past, with a limited number of additional DPEs.

That point may initially make you think if you are reading this, we simply need more DPEs, but the question is more complex than that. Just more DPEs isn’t a complete answer, because it also depends on how many practical tests per year each DPE conducts. If we have more DPEs that don’t do many tests per year, we don’t increase our total volume of testing throughput as we do if we add more DPEs who do higher numbers of testing events. To put a number to this, if we added 50 more DPEs that did 50 tests per year, we would only increase the testing volume by 2,500 more tests. If we added 50 DPEs who did 200 tests per year, we would increase our throughput by 10,000 tests.

Makes sense, right?

The next graph is what I affectionally call the DPE pain ratio. It is a ratio of how many tests per DPE there are. As the graph goes up, it means the average number of tests per DPE required is going up. If it goes down, we are improving.

We have made some progress in the last couple of years; the FAA has been able to increase our number of DPEs. More good news, the FAA has been adding DPEs who are increasing their volume over the past few years.

Ok, this next chart is going to hurt a little bit to explain. It is a breakdown of the number of DPEs and how many practical tests they did per year and how many of the DPEs did tests in a particular volume level.

You can click here to open this chart in another window, bigger, because I know this is a little hard to see this small .

What we see here is that in recent years we have historically seen that only about one-third of our DPEs were doing more than 100 practical tests per year. Recently, we have seen more than half of our DPE population doing that. More production out of the DPEs we have. Additionally interesting, in the past, over half of our DPEs did less than 50 practical tests per year, and as of the last two years, the number of DPEs that did that was under 30%.

Overall, we are adding some DPEs, we have significantly increased the demand on them over the past couple of decades as training volumes have gone up and throughput from training providers has increased, but we are also increasing the number of tests many of our DPEs give per year.

The DPE ratio and the backlog of practical tests is a multifaceted relationship, and these are just a few pieces of the answers to “how can I get a checkride scheduled sooner?”

I hope this data helps share at least a little understanding of the data behind it all!

Last year again saw an increase in the number of CFI certificates issued. As a continuing primary pathway to gain experience as a pilot to become an ATP, we continue to see large numbers of CFI certificates issued. We can see from the following chart that the CFI certificated again went up in 2025.

The table to the right here shows a few interesting data points: the number of active CFI certificates, how many new CFI certificates were issued in each year, and the average age of CFIs who held certificates in each year.

Heavy CFI certificate issuance numbers in the past few years is driving the average age of CFIs down even as the overall number of CFI certificates held continues to climb.

It is worth noting that holding a CFI certificate does not imply that the CFI is actively providing training. We know that MANY CFIs get their certificate, provide training for a period of time, and then transition into professional pilot jobs. These professional pilots eventually retire and “keep their CFI certificate from expiring,” so they don’t lose it.

So we have to look at some more data points to help contextualize the real makeup of our CFI population.

Let’s start with the data point of how many total CFI certificates are held, as we can see in the following chart (145, 538 at the end of 2025):

Then we might look at the average age of CFI certificate holders in the entire population, which we see as having been slightly under 44 back in 1999. By 2018, we saw a high point of that average age peaking at over 48 years old. But since then, the average has been decreasing, down to under 45 again as of 2025.

Why does this matter, you might be thinking?

My question is, what is it telling us?

Moving the averages in a data set this big, it means that there is a large input in the bottom portions of the data set, in this case, the numbers of younger CFIs. This matches up with the increasing number of younger CFIs being issued in the last few years.

But there still exists a large data set of older CFIs in the total number. We can see from the chart below that there are larger percentages of our CFI population that are over the ages of 65 or even 70.

Now, no offense mean by this, but many of them will die in the next decade or so. It’s just math. The average age of death for a male person in the United States as of 2025 was 76.5 years old. So, just math, at least some pretty significant numbers of those CFIs who still hold certificates will likely be coming out of our total CFI population pool in the next decade.

The point here is that if anyone is looking at our CFI total population as the number of certificates held and thinking they are all actively instructing, or will continue to do so, is looking at the data without contextualizing it.

I posted back in January about the number of CFIs who actually signed off any students for a practical test in 2025 (CFI Signoff Frequency in 2025), and we saw that only 23,649 CFIs signed someone off for a practical test.

We can see from the chart to the right here that it is a much smaller percentage of the CFI population that has signed off even 1 applicant for a practical test in any given year.

Pass Rates on CFI Initial Practical Tests

More information in an upcoming post will be presented on overall pass rates on certification events, but 2025 again saw the pass rate for initial CFI practical tests decrease. This trend has been going on since 2021 when it was at its peak at over 77%, with 2025 now dropping down to 73.7 percent. You can see the trend in the chart below. Check back in the upcoming days for more content on this and other certification points relative to pass rates in 2025 compared to recent years and the trends we are seeing.