Silvaire wrote:
Currency is the only thing that expires, and it is not tracked by FAA.
No, but the “airman database” does tell you the date of issue of the most recent medical. So you can easily see people who no longer have a current medical. I agree it gives you no idea whether they are current in other respects, e.g. valid BFR. But at least in theory you can not fly for 20 years, then go up and get a BFR and you’re good to go again.
Ratings are printed on an FAA pilot certificate and like the certificate itself are forever. Currency is the only thing that expires, and it is not tracked by FAA.
johnh wrote:
Then there’s currency. In the US a licence is forever, but a medical isn’t. There are plenty of people who have a PPL but no medical. It’s possible to download the “airman database” and do whatever analysis you want on it.
Aren’t the class ratings time limited in the US? The licenses are also forever in Europe, so many CAAs (e.g. the Swedish ones) use valid class ratings rather than licenses for the number of licensed pilots.
Vladimir wrote:
I found some statistics from different years (from 2009 till now)
So, a quick perusal reveals that us pilots are basically one in a thousand types! We all knew we were special, and this confirms it.
Then there’s currency. In the US a licence is forever, but a medical isn’t. There are plenty of people who have a PPL but no medical. It’s possible to download the “airman database” and do whatever analysis you want on it.
(For example, I wanted to know how many ATP-AMES there are – since a friend of mine happens ot be one, more or less by accident. The number is surprisingly high, around 500, though I doubt many of them practice the craft).
Sorry for resurrecting this old topic, but I was just wondering the same, about how many pilots are out there in the world.
So can we conclude that the world average is about 0.1 % of the population? USA being probably the highest with 0.2% and some African, Asian countries being at or below 0.05%. That gives about 3.5 – 4 million pilots worldwide. It’s a pretty exclusive club I would say, even compared to the number of sailboats for example (that being in the 10 million range worldwide). (if we assume that people having a license to or being able to navigate one is 1 per boat)
I can’t see any information on any of the aeroclub pages I looked at.
Those annual hours look similar to the UK profile, I would think.
Balliol’s numbers look right too but how does one relate this to the 30k aircraft which one often sees mentioned?
It would be extremely interesting to get data on how long the average new PPL hangs in there. Maybe somebody will have a go under FOIA? We aren’t going to find out any other way; the CAA has never published anything directly, but obviously they must know – at least to the extent that they know about valid medicals. They can never know what most of the NPPL population is doing.
Returning to the discussion about a year ago, we were talking about this in the (4 aircraft) aéroclub this summer. I’ve summarised the first half of the year in the table below, so it would be reasonably safe to double these figures for annual numbers. 560 hours in 6 months for 54 members, average slightly over 10h, so 20.5 hours per year.
This isn’t the full picture, because at least three members also own their own aircraft, one of which lends his plane to a several pilots (myself included 
). There are several people like me who fly a few hours on holiday, but do most of their flying elsewhere. There’s also some based microlights not affiliated with the club.
The DGAC publish hours flown per aéroclub here (by clicking on the département then selecting the club)
I suspect from association membership numbers and knowing how many people who have both UK and EASA licences, that the number of GA (ie non CPL and above) licence holders is around 15000. I would suspect about 1/4 are pretty much non active so call that 4000, so 11000 active. The average amongst that lot is probably in the region 30-40 hours per year at best.
[this is of course beermat analysis but I suspect isn’t far off]
The NPPL numbers shown are indeed low but I think that’s because the published number doesn’t include those flying on the Medical Self Declaration. For the NPPL, I would think this will today be the majority.
This thread suggests there may be ~ 2k NPPL holders.
