The airline industry has seen reduced hiring in 2025, which has also led to a reduction in the production of ATP certifications. The largest numbers of ATP certifications typically happen concurrently with initial airline training, through the ATP-CTP course, and then the ATP certification that occurs with an initial type rating, most frequently at regional airlines.
Many regional airlines have reduced or fully stopped “new hire classes” in 2025, and we can see the effect of this in the current ATP certification trends year-to-date.
The table here shows a comparison of ATP certificate issuance month-by-month, looking back to 2022 when we saw some of the highest rates of hiring and certification coming out of the COVID pause.
When we compare the half-year point in 2025 to 2024, we see a nearly 25% drop in year-to-date ATP AMEL certifications this year comparatively.
When hiring does again ramp up, we will see those numbers likely correlate with increases of ATP certification as larger, Major airlines, hire pilots from the regional airlines and then the regional airlines are required to back fill those vacated positions with new hire classes again, resulting in new pilots being pushed through larger classes of initial ATP certification processes than we are currently seeing in 2025.
The graph below shows a visible trend of ATP AMEL production in 2022, 2023, and 2024, potentially showing a maximum production level. We can see that we have a differential from previous production in 2025 with a much lower trend line (the red one) that shows the gap in production so far this year.
