So how many flight hours DOES it take to get a private pilot certificate? Or an instrument rating? Or even a commercial pilot certificate?
Well, the FAA does gather this data on the application forms that it collects when a practical test is conducted for a certificate or rating, but, to the best of my knowledge, it is not collected, collated, and reported in any way to the public as an aggregate.
But that doesn’t stop us from being curious, so I took the data from the FAA 8710-1 forms from the over 1000 practical tests I have given and collated it into a couple of data points that are now presented in this small, but highly intriguing chart.
The below chart collects data from practical tests I have given (primarily in Michigan) and helps create a general understanding of how many hours of flight and simulator time that applicants had accumulated at the time of granting of various pilot certificates and ratings. Specifically, we compiled the data for the initial private pilot certificate, instrument rating, and initial commercial multi-engine certificate events
With that said, here is what we found.
