TSA Flight Training Request Numbers Show Continued Training Industry Service to Non-U.S. Pilot Training Needs

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Flight training to non-U.S. citizens remains a large part of the flight training community in the United States. This is something that FSANA gets and I work look at each year, with data provided by the TSA. The interest is to keep an eye on over time and is encouraged to see continuing increases in requests to have training conducted in the United States.

While there was an expected dip in this request process during COVID travel restrictions, the monthly, and yearly request numbers are returning to prior and in some categories, increasing, numbers of requests.

The TSA tracks these numbers as “threat assessments” being requested, which is basically an approval to have training completed. Most commonly these training requests are for initial private pilot certification, instrument ratings, multi-engine ratings, and pilot type ratings. You can see this in the following table and see how these numbers have been tracked over the recent years.

You can also see in the graph below a more granular, monthly tracking of overall training requests. While we have not yet fully returned to full pre-COVID training request numbers monthly, we are seeing a continual increase. Of some interest should also be the fact that even in depths of lockdown periods, the requests never really fell to zero either. The flight training industry remained as productive as possible as a vital part of making sure the flight decks of future travel and cargo needs would remain filled.

Private Pilot and Commercial Pilot FAA Knowledge Allowed Test Times Reducing Starting April 24, 2023

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The FAA has recently notified the industry that there will be reductions in the allowed time for applicants taking the Private Pilot Airplane (PAR) and Commercial Pilot Airplane (CAX) FAA knowledge tests. Administrated at PSI-operated authorized testing sites, these two tests will each see applicants have a half hour less time to complete the required tests.

In the notification, the FAA noted that:

You can see the notice from the FAA at: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/Community_Advisory_Feb_2023.pdf

This means applicants will have less time during these tests to complete the number of test questions on each test, and, with the second part of the notice, more questions to complete without the knowledge of which test questions are sample validation questions and which ones count toward their final score.

Some tips for test takers here that might help.

Prioritize questions.

There will be topics and questions you know best. Get those done first. Work through the test and answer the questions you know, then return to the ones you were less confident about. You don’t have to do the test questions in the order that they pop up in the system. It is perfectly acceptable to skip and come back to questions.

Come back to questions if you have time.

Don’t get stuck on a question. If you aren’t sure, move on. Get as many questions done as you are confident you can accurately answer then come back if you have excess time to the ones you skipped. Don’t leave anything unanswered, make the best guess instead of leaving something blank, but leave questions you aren’t sure about to spend more time on later if you have leftover time

Use your time wisely.

Don’t get stuck on a question. If there is something you don’t know, move on. Come back to it later. Spend your time on the questions you know how to answer best to improve your score potential and then come back to questions you are having trouble with. The goal is to answer as many questions correctly as possible, not to waste time on questions you might find challenging.

There is a strategy to test-taking. As tests have limited time, this strategy changes. Think carefully and strategically as you take the FAA tests to ensure you get the best score possible.

Aircraft Deliveries in Flight Training Context – with 2022 Numbers

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Aircraft are a critical component of the business infrastructure of flight training. If we look back in history, we used to produce LOTS more aircraft per year. But times have changed. If we look at the graph below, we see the major dropoff in production numbers for single- and multi-engine piston aircraft in the United States that happened in the early 1990’s. Our numbers never returned to that level.

And they may never. The market has changed. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that what we are currently producing will meet the needs of the flight training efforts in the United States going forward either.

When we look at more recent years, we see much lower shipment numbers of both categories. The table to the right, and the graph below, show this vividly.

This begs a question though, why?

Is there not enough demand for aircraft for large manufacturers to dedicate the production process to more aircraft? Is there not enough demand for manufacturers to invest in expanded capacity?

When we think about manufacturing production capacity, I get it. Businesses build things that they will sell more of that have the largest profit margin. If we can’t make the case in the flight training community that this is not something that we offer in our purchasing efforts, we might need to approach how we communicate with manufacturers from the flight training community better.

Many flight training providers are still using aircraft that were produced in the heavy production years from the 1970’s and 80’s. These aircraft are wearing out, they are becoming harder to maintain, and their dispatch reliability is simply less profitable than newer aircraft. As our industry transitions from these older legacy aircraft, we will need to replace them with new fleets. That means that new fleets need to be available.

Multi-engine aircraft are of specific concern for many flight training providers. While most primary training is completed in single-engine aircraft, there is still a need to get multi-engine pilot certification for career path pilot training. Many flight training providers keep piecing together old, legacy, and hard-to-maintain aircraft just to keep their multi-engine training even available. The production numbers of multi-engine aircraft are likely very short of the industry’s needs for the future.

I can’t help but think that there are opportunities here available for some manufacturer to really corner the market on the next generation of flight-training aircraft if they invest and work with the flight-training community.