Year to March 2016: EASA LAPL(A) 284
2017: missing
Year to March 2018: EASA LAPL(A) 542
Year to March 2019: EASA LAPL(A) 443
These numbers are interesting.
They are only UK issued licenses, but unless the UK is unique in the LAPL popularity (or lack of, depending on how you look at it), it isn’t quite true that nobody is doing the LAPL which has been stated (and stated to me, and then I repeated it) all over the place.
It looks like about 1/4 of PPLs issued are LAPLs.
This means that an FI without CPL theory can potentially do a fair bit of work at a school/club where they are happy for him/her to work that way.
I wonder if there are any similar stats available for other countries in Europe?
No numbers, but LAPL is definitely increasing.
Peter wrote:
Some new data from the UK has turned up
Is this total current numbers or rather only new licenses?
Peter wrote:
This means that an FI without CPL theory can potentially do a fair bit of work at a school/club where they are happy for him/her to work that way.
I’ve been saying this for a couple of years. Based on the grounds that I know two LAPL FI’s that work full time.
Perhaps the other reason for the large increase in the number of LAPL’s issued despite all the internet experts saying its a waste of time licence. Is the simple fact that there are so few instructors that can offer PPL training these days. That some schools simply offer the student a LAPL or nothing else.
Is this total current numbers or rather only new licenses?
New issues during that 12 month period. The data I saw is in the same format as the previous years’ data from that CAA web link. Nobody knows why they stopped publishing it in 2016. There was speculation that they didn’t want to publicise a strong collapse, but this can’t be the reason. They publish totals of license holders, up to date, here.
What’s the situation on the LAPL medical? Are there any useful concessions? @Frank might know. The main reason for the UK NPPL is the self declaration medical route. Big drop in NPPL numbers too.
This is really funny. The CAA must be reading EuroGA even more diligently than we all knew 
Just now the new data has been added at the existing place
and the latest data (the three top lines) are broken links
EDIT new URL
The French aéroclub figures to 2018 are here local copy for the various federations (powered, glider, microlight, gyrocopter, balloon, homebuilt/vintage, model, parachute, hang-gliding). Slow decline for gliding and powered, but gyrocopter despite losing a third of members has doubled its hours, and microlight has grown fantastically since 1995. Not a big take-up in the LAPL. Usual warning, this is members of clubs and doesn’t include private owners/co-owners, commercial rentals, foreign-owned etc.
I’ve merged this thread with another very similar from further back.
Some interesting numbers appear earlier e.g. here for Sweden and Germany.
More numbers for Sweden and France are here.
Can a German speaker translate the PDFs here and possibly find numbers for annual hours flown, annual infringments, and maybe other stuff, for here? Many thanks
Did the UK licences issued figures include EASA and UK PPL licences issued to replace old UK licenses, to people like me? Or only newly qualified pilots. Some people also converted NPPL to LAPL. And PPL to LAPL.
I can get hold of hard copies which someone got under FOIA recently, but I suggest waiting until the CAA’s “head of cloud technology” gets his act together and fixes the dead links which he (she?) created in the last day or two here and this may answer your questions.
