2023 FAA Airmen Data

[FormerHangie]

The Feds have released the U.S. Civil Airmen Statistics are now available. I'm a numbers guy and find this stuff interesting, and if you do too, this should make for an interesting discussion.

First up, the total pilot count:


The pilot count is up, pretty much across the board, save for the mostly moribund Recreational Pilot rating. Having a hard time finding a plane to buy, and then having an equally hard time finding a place to put it? I can believe that. Few new airplanes are being made, and I don't think the number of public use airports is increasing much, if at all. One caveat: the count of student pilots is misleading, because student certs don't expire, and most of those in that count are inactive. A better idea of student activity can be gotten from the number of new student certificates issued:


These are up solidly as well, which explains the market for Cessna 172s.

Number of ratings earned is up as well:


All this points to solid growth. One other thing I look at is avgas consumption, with is provided by the US Energy Information Administration. I'm using their product supplied statistics, which is what they use for consumption:


It's down. Something here doesn't add up. I was trying to reconcile these two sets of data, how is it that training activity is up but avgas consumption is down. One possibility is that the business and commercial part of GA switched from pistons to turbines. I do believe that has happened, but it mostly happened in the 2010s. If you go to FlightAware and look at the aircraft aloft by type, the count of piston aircraft that typically would be used for some sort of revenue service (Navajos, 400 series Cessna twins, Air Bemidji's fleet of Queen Airs, and Cape Air's fleet of TECNAM P-2012s, and the volume is very low, and has been for a while. What that led me to was to find out who was flying what, which is continued in the next post.

 

[FormerHangie]

Earlier this year I started grabbing some numbers from FlightAware on which and how many general aviation airplanes were flying. To be more specific, I was interested in those that are typically owner/renter flown, or user for tra. I pulled down the numbers from FlightAware's Airborne Aircraft by type page, and removed the airliners, turbine twins, helicopters, and PC-12s from the list, figuring those are in revenue service. I then categorized them in two groups, trainers (Cessna 10, 152, 172, Piper PA-28 and PA44 (Seminole), Cirrus SR-20) and everything else. I did this for a Friday-Tuesday period in February. Here's the counts of the groups:


Clearly, this is a crude approach as to determining which of these are training flights and which are owner/renter flown. Plenty of the aircraft that I put in the trainer group are owner/renter flown, and a number of those I put in the owner flown group are used as trainers. Looking through the list of airplanes in the owner flown group, I can see that over the last 20 years that there are more turbine owner flown airplanes, but they still are only a few percent of the fleet.

There's nothing here that's definitive, but what it looks like to me that the majority of hours flown in the types of aircraft most of us fly is for training.

Two more charts: Certificate holders by age, 2023:


And certificates held by age, 2018:



There's been an influx of young pilots.

 

[RyanShort1]

Avgas usage could be down from more efficient GPH trainers like Rotax powered aircraft being used might cut the fuel down by 40%

 

[dbahn]

I suspect there's a big difference between "certificates held" (first image) and "active pilots". There are a lot of certificates held by pilots who haven't flown in years. In fact, if they're not surrended, when are they NOT held?

I would think that the amount of fuel sold is much more relevant because regardless of certificates held the aircraft fleet remains relatively constant.

 

[TCABM]

Student certs more than doubled; PPL or better only grew by ~3%.

 

[TCABM]

Next year's numbers will tell how many of those new students become PPLs.

True; I was looking at the 10-yr trend. The August spikes are probably starts at the university 141 programs.

 

[Chip Sylverne]

Totally swag, but since commercial Ops are the greatest consumers of avgas, as evidenced by "drop- in" 100 octane unleaded fuel specs, and many of the commercial Ops are changing to kerosene burners, it would stand to reason a gas consumption would be down.

Freight dogs don't fly checks in twins anymore.

Sim training may be taking bite too. But funny how consumption is down, but the price keeps going up.

 

[Gilbert Buettner]

Why does the Recreational cert still exist?

When it first arrived, my flight school trained a couple of recreational pilots. I am not aware of any of them actively flying.

 

[TCABM]

…But funny how consumption is down, but the price keeps going up.

Back side of the power curve applies to boutique fuels, too.

 

[FormerHangie]

Totally swag, but since commercial Ops are the greatest consumers of avgas, as evidenced by "drop- in" 100 octane unleaded fuel specs, and many of the commercial Ops are changing to kerosene burners, it would stand to reason a gas consumption would be down.

Freight dogs don't fly checks in twins anymore.

Sim training may be taking bite too. But funny how consumption is down, but the price keeps going up.

No question that the commercial ops have switched to turbine equipment. Looking at FlightAware here early on a Sunday morning, there are 17 each of Caravans and PC-12s flying, one Navajo, 7 Cessna 402s (5 are Cape Air), and one Cessna 421. I think this changeover was pretty well finished in the 2010s.

What I now think has happened is that flight training has seen strong growth and personal flying is on the decline. Look at this comparison of private pilots by age in 2018 versus 2023.

I'm guessing that the big increase in new pilots are mostly training for airline jobs, while the number of private pilots in the 45-69 age group, who are doing personal flying has declined. It's likely that the young pilots are mostly flying trainers and the personal flyers tend to fly bigger birds.