There’s been a lot of chatter on the forum about CB-IR and clearly quite a few forumites have achieved a full IR qualification through that route.
I was looking for recent statistics but can’t find any. This spreadsheet published by UK CAA dates back for the year ending March 2016, over 18 months ago.
There are a few anomalies in it which are somewhat perplexing. They’ve confused matters a lot by simply stating licence transactions and not “de-duplicating” the issue of national and EASA licences for the same individuals, which makes some of the numbers much larger than perhaps should be the case.
It states just 50 new IR’s issued to PPL(A) which seems credible. It’s quite possible that numbers have increased in the past 12 months and would be useful to know.
However it only lists a total of 142 IRs issued including for all commercial pilots. Surely there must be more commercial pilot training than that, or is this hidden in ATPL issue? That contrasts with over 3000 night ratings issued.
It would also be useful to know how many have started and finished the theory exams. This would give some indication of how much of a bottleneck/problem these are. The fancy new online e-Exam system should make that fairly easy to report from.
Do other CAAs publish statistics on licences issued in the past year? Any pointers for how many the French, German or other authorities have processed?
Historically the number of IRs issued to “normal” UK private pilots has been around 10-20 a year. Some 10 years ago a group got a discount on the CATS ground school and the resulting blip showed up as a doubling or some such. I would be surprised 50 private pilots a year are doing the IR today. More likely there is some “leakage” into the numbers from the FTO pipeline, comprising of students who just happen to have the PPL and then did the IR, rather than the other way round. The CAA has no reason to separate these out because nobody has any idea of what long term intentions somebody has. And some private pilots (who are way too old to get an airline job) have entered the FTO machine too, to do the 14 exams as a hobby project perhaps.
@RobertL18C might know more.
Of course people have bigger hopes for the CB-IR route.
I am somewhat less optimistic since – for the “private pilot IR candidate actually capable of flying IFR long-term” demographic – the exams are the biggest hassle, closely followed by broad unwillingness of schools to train in customer aircraft, and the exams are still there and are still as full of crap as they ever were.
Looking for a bit more hard evidence, I found this webpage on the German LBA website which if I understand it correctly, succinctly states the number of licences/ratings in force for each of the past 3 years. It splits out those for women in brackets. If I understand it correctly, these are the commercial and IFR licences active at national level (total around 20,000). There are separately around 68,000 VFR only private pilot licences (not microlights) active which were issued directly by the German states.
Private IFR licences have their own row and appear to be quite substantial (almost 2000)
Population of Germany today approx 80 million, so I pilot in 1000 people, and 1 IFR private pilot in 40,000 people, I IFR lady private pilot in >1,000,000 people.
Slight hiccup with Google translate on the year headings, so I’ve included both original and translated versions
More statistics available from LBA here
Links to other country’s CAA statistics webpages appreciated.
