Is Where You Are Going Really Where You Are Going?

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Programming the correct things into your navigation system is pretty darn important. The wrong information in the navigation system gets you to the wrong place. And unless you are just looking for an adventure, or to get ATC grump, going to the wrong place probably isn’t what you want to do.

This can be especially challenging to get correct when there are waypoints that are very close in what the “spelling” of the identifiers are, such as in the case of KMKG (the airport) and MKG (the waypoint that was formerly a VOR).

In the picture to the right, you can see that the “magenta line” isn’t exactly headed toward the Muskegon, MI (KMKG) airport. Continue reading →

A little night currency, and another annual in the books for Charlie

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With a forecast of a week of lousy flying weather ahead, it was a calm evening before the storm to take advantage of for a little night currency with Charlie. It didn’t take long for this, the second flight after a return from her annual in mid-March.

Always getting later in the summer, the opportunity to reset a night tailwheel currency (and ASEL) is a little more palatable to me the older I get when it is at 9pm instead of 11pm or later in the middle of the summer up here! Continue reading →

CFI Pass Rates On the Rise…Correlations with Past Regulations Changes?

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One of the data points that stuck out to me this year in the U.S. Civil Airman Statistics relates to a continued jump in pass rates on initial CFI practical tests. A test for a certificate that has historically been rumored to have exceedingly high initial test failure rates, the numbers over the past few years have been improving.

We can see from the data (as I have compiled it from multiple years of FAA reporting) that the pass rate remained very stable over the past couple of decades, hovering near the 68-69% range for most of those years.

Since 2019, that rate has been climbing.

In fact, the pass rate has increased nearly 10% on average over the past three years.

I can’t help but be curious, why?

Jokingly, I was talking about this with a colleague and said, “must be the DPEs are all getting easier.” He responded, “how do we know it isn’t just flight training has improved?”

I guess, it could be either. But it could also be something else all together. IN fact, the timing of the improvement in the pass rates correlates closely with another potential explanation.

Continue reading →

Not to Forget About the Aircraft Mechanics; What Data Tells Us About Those that Keep Our Planes Flying

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I like looking at pilot certificate data. Those of you that read this blog probably already know this. But what about mechanics?

Airplanes don’t fly, at least for long periods of time without mechanical attention. Our pilot population is aging, declining, and changing; so is our mechanic population.

A starting point might be to look at the total number of “mechanic certificates held” as a measure of how many are out there.

The graph below shows some data here that does indicate that in a general sense we have less mechanic certificates held now than we did going back to 1999. We are somewhere around 30,000 less mechanic certificates held than at that time.

This chart however in some ways drives more questions than it answers. Sure, if we look at 1999 and 2021 comparatively we see that there are less certificates held in 2021. But we also see some big dips and then climb backs of numbers of certificates held. Certification process seems to be the explanation for the big drops (changing in timing and process for maintaining IA certificates – that require renewal). So, the gist is that isn’t as big a worry as the chart might initially indicate, but anytime we see a bunch of people drop out of certificate, even for administrative reasons, it generally results in less of them “becoming recurrent” again. Continue reading →