General aviation is always under a pall of bad news when it comes to growth. If it’s not stupid pilot tricks or a celebrity getting the wrong kind of attention, we can look no further than contemporary sales figures for piston airplanes and compare them with the late 1970s.
Another scorekeeping statistic is student starts, which tells us how many potential pilots are in the training pipeline. This has implications for new-aircraft sales, plus utilization, as well as the overall health of the industry. It’s perhaps less accurate at predicting whether your next airline flight will have more than one experienced pilot aboard. Nevertheless, there’s some good news we can share.
The headline is that annual student starts were up markedly in 2023 over the previous few years. In 2023, the FAA issued some 69,503 new student pilot certificates, versus 56,710 in 2022. That’s an increase of more than 13,000 year-over-year. During the Covid-19 pandemic—2020-2021—new students hovered around the 50,000 mark, but they’ve definitely bounced back.
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