Pilot Population Growth: Mixed News

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In another chapter of my publishing career that might as well have taken place on Mars, I worked for a company that hit the magic. It started a publication in the craft field right in the midst of an explosive interest in craft revival in the mid-1970s that few knew was happening. (No internet then; no Facebook, no Google.) In those days—and still—we sold magazines through junk mail packages and with a near bottomless pit of latent demand, those mail packages returned as much as 20 percent, a response that’s scarcely believable today. (Two percent is a smash hit now.)

That insane success was a mixed blessing. It made for tidy profits, but it set expectations so high that future sales efforts were never seen as worthy, even if they turned 10 or 12 percent. In reviewing pilot certification stats for this blog, that experience came immediately to mind. Check out the graph below and notice the rocket rise of pilot growth between 1965 and 1971. It didn’t quite double, but it did increase by 71 percent. We were adding as many as 75,000 pilots a year for an average growth of about 3.3 percent. (It had spikes up and down, of course.) We didn’t know it then—and that’s when I came into general aviation—but it couldn’t last. In retrospect, that curve has all the earmarks of a bubble and it’s not unusual for any product or service in a developed economy to mature this way.

 /></a><br />click for full-size image</p><p>Why did it happen and why can’t we duplicate it? It’s complicated, but my guess is the mid-1960s were the perfect combination of World War II veterans, many of whom were pilots, reaching financial security in their 40s in a strong economy. There were 5 and 7 percent growth years in the general economy during the period. Cessna was coming of age as a mass manufacturer of then-affordable airplanes and if nothing else, it knew how to sell them. Unions were reaching peak influence and yes, factory workers could afford to buy airplanes and did. The airlines were growing and hiring, too, and the pipeline was partially stoked with GA pilots. But all bubbles eventually pop and the GA boom did in 1980. Pilot starts diminished gracefully, a trend that continues yet today. Manufacturing volume went off a cliff and now it’s just tumbling gently down a screed slope. The peak volume never recovered and many of those airplanes we fly yet today.</p><p>We never got over those peak years. How many times have you read in this blog or other analytics a reference to the glory days followed by the lament that if we did it then, we can do it again? We must be doing something wrong, goes the reasoning. But we aren’t. Faded glory isn’t an opportunity for a corrective, but a starting point for what’s next.</p><p><a href=In Monday’s blog, I opined that three developments may inject a little vitality into GA: Third Class Medical reform, the Part 23 revision and relaxed avionics regulations. I’m not expecting a buying frenzy, but I still see these trends as nothing but positive. Is there concurrent good—OK, less gloomy—news in the pilot certification trends? Hard to say, but it’s not all bad news, either. I’ve always maintained that GA is shrinking rather than dying and it will eventually find a critical mass and resume modest growth.

I can’t put that on the calendar, although in its most recent aviation forecast, the FAA thinks private pilot certificates will decrease by 0.6 percent a year until 2036, beyond which its crystal ball doesn’t extend.Just for the record, since the 1980 zenith, the pilot population has decreased an average of 0.9 percent per year. During the past 10 years, it has declined to 590,039 from a 10-year high of 627,588 in 2010. Historically, the decline has been steeper at times and shallower at times. Note the sharp drop-off in 2012. Those have occurred before, so I don’t know what it means, if anything. I’m not sure how reliable the FAA data, from whence I got these numbers, really is.

But also see the sharp uptick in student pilot certifications beginning in 2010. That’s great news, right? Well, sort of. It’s due at least partially to a regulatory sleight of hand that increased the duration of student pilot certificates for under-40 students from 36 months to 60. I see that is good because heretofore, when the 36 months passed, students may have been less likely to renew. Now they’ve got five years and perhaps, by random chance, if they hang around that long they’ll bump into an actual pilot certificate. It beats the alternative, no?

Growth is clearly evident in the sport pilot category. It’s fashionable to describe the sport pilot segment as a miserable failure, both in terms of pilots added to the flock and airplanes added to the fleet. The airplanes, after all, turn out not to cost $40,000, which some of us seem to have thought they would. This sentiment is understandable if you lapse into the logic of using the never-to-return glory days of 1980 as the metric.

 /></a><br />click for full-size image</p><p>Nonetheless, the FAA’s records show we’ve added 5482 sport pilots to the rolls since 2005. See the graph for the details. This is indeed modest growth, but it’s growth all the same. Bitch about it if you must, but I don’t find much merit in that because (a) I don’t have a better suggestion to offer cheaper new airplanes and easier pilot certification and (b) neither does anyone else. If you want to really complain about something being a failure, that would be the recreational pilot certificate. As of 2015, that rating had declined to a lousy 190. I don’t think it ever got much above 300. I wonder if we would be further along if the recreational pilot had been what the sport pilot certificate has become. But in 1990, when it was created, we were still in a regulatory straitjacket that we’re just now beginning to loosen.</p><p>I claim no particular expertise in predicting how the general aviation market will perform, or fail to. I’m not sure the FAA is any better at it either, because the agency is hobbled by the same unknowns as the rest of us. The only advantage we have is that we understand how regulation has inhibited both growth and continued participation by those already in the industry while the FAA is just slowly, dimly beginning to grasp this.</p><p>I will claim to be—or try to be—clear eyed about industry prospects. There are no market forces visible that will return us to the salad days of 1972, no matter what happens with regulation or how much we jawbone about medicals, the high cost of airframes and avionics and what it costs to get through the gate at Sun ‘n Fun. It’s just the reality we live with. The demographics were different then. So are the economics. Within our difficult universe there are plenty of green shoots, just no shimmering city on the hill. Personally, as I mentioned in Monday’s blog, I like to rise above the wallow, at least momentarily, and grasp whatever bright spots I can find. And there are a few to relieve the drumbeat of negativity.I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to take what I can get for now.</p><p>In the next blog, I’ll take a look at the big coming growth engine: Icon.Yes, Icon. If you plug their claims into a spreadsheet, the sky parts and the sun shines.</p></div><footer><div class=

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