Mireille Goyer
September 25, 2021 at 1:40 pm
The “growth” of the student pilot population in the last 10 years is driven only by a change of FAA recording as stated in Note 1.

Note 1: In July 2010, the FAA issued a rule that increased the duration of validity for student pilot certificates for pilots under the age of 40 from 36 to 60 months. This resulted in the increase in active student pilots to 119,119 from 72,280 at the end of 2009. Starting with April 2016, there is no expiration date on the new student pilot certificates, which generates a cumulative increase in the numbers.

The student “growth” you mentioned is in fact the student dropout rate. It is increasing (especially among female student pilots). Meanwhile, the level of annual student starts (table 22) is decreasing – from 66,953 in 2006 to 55,298 in 2011 to 49,933 in 2020.

Pilot candidates who go through the trouble of getting a medical certificate (the only students recorded by the FAA) know about the cost of learning to fly. That is not the deterrent. As an flight instructor, I have found that the deterrent is two folds: unexpected complexity (flight environment + new avionics) and uncontrollable training timeline. This does need to be addressed if we are to grow the Private aviation sector.