Pilot Population Growth: Mixed News
Priviate pilot numbers continue to decline in a slide that began 36 years ago. But sport pilot certs are up and maybe students are, too.
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.
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.
