Commercial Pilot

Commercial Pilots and the CFI Crossroads

April 3, 2023 by Scott Spangler

Talking last week to a 30-something professional pilot about his journey to a Gulfstream cockpit, he brought my interrogation to a dead silent stop with his answer to one question. After he summarized the chronology of his pilot certificates and ratings, I asked about the one he didn’t mention, the CFI—certificated flight instructor.

Like a lot of younger pilots striving for paying careers, he said, given the pilot job market, the CFI is a crossroads between spending a lot more money and time to earn the most demanding and challenging pilot certification in all of aviation, and getting a job that pays money. The answer is clear, he said, especially if a new commercial pilot also has a multiengine rating.

In three decades of interrogating professional pilots, the only ones who typically didn’t have a CFI earned their wings in the military (but many of them earned their CFI after they transitioned to their airline life). I’m sure there are some professional pilots who clawed their way up the civilian ladder who skipped the CFI rung, but I don’t remember ever talking to any of them.

Talking to one who might be an exception does not define a new rule in today’s training and professional pilot markets without some quantification. Absent the resources to survey today’s population of pro pilots, I turned to the FAA’s U.S. Civil Airman Statistics. Among the many tables in each year’s spreadsheet is one that gives a 10-year look at initial certificates issued.

Here is the table of the initial issuance of commercial and flight instructor certificates earned in 2013 to 2022. (I added the yellow to remind me of the pandemic disruption.) At first glance, the numbers don’t seem to support that the CFI crossroads is trending no CFI. And without a doubt, the pilot job market is much better now than it was a decade ago.

What’s interesting is that the number of commercial certificates peaked in 2020, the year the CDC shutdown the nation on March 15, a shutdown that continued through the end of April 2020. The initial CFI issuances peaked last year. Equally interesting is the shared trend of increasing totals of issued certificates, which only took a short step back during the shutdown.

The low numbers in the early teens are surely the nagging consequences of the Great Recession of 2007-2008. But an equally important trend is the difference between those issued a commercial and a CFI. It was roughly 50/50 in 2017, the year my subject graduated from college. Naturally, this isn’t the best measure of a pilot’s crossroads’ decision, but it’s the best one readily available.

The number of commercial pilots who didn’t earn a CFI trended higher until the pandemic, so maybe there’s something to my pro pilot’s crossroads observation. Certainly, this topic might make an excellent survey and statistics project for someone now enrolled in an aviation degree program. What decision did you make at the CFI crossroads. — Scott Spangler, Editor

New Rule ‘Advances’ Pilot Training Back to the Fundamentals of Flight

November 11, 2013 by Scott Spangler

Responding to the tragedy of Colgan Flight 3407, the FAA has issued a final rule that “is a significant advancement for aviation safety and U.S. pilot training,” says Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx in the FAA news release.

Really?

To quote the FAA release, the new rules requires these stick-and-rudder skills: “ground and flight training that enables pilots to prevent and recover from aircraft stalls and upsets” and “expanded crosswind training, including training for wind gusts.”

The other requirements all have to do with paperwork, such as “tracking remedial training” and “more effective pilot monitoring,” which is important in assessing blame after unfortunate pilots have a problem related to their lack of current stick-and-rudder skills.

Can I really be so old that the skills my instructor reinforced with practice on almost every lesson—recovering from stalls and unusual attitudes—are now considered advanced training? And landing in a crosswind, at least at most of the airports I called home, was not a special skill. When I was flying in the Kansas City area, landing without a crosswind was the challenge.

Perhaps I am. I learned to fly in the last decade of aviation’s analog era. Back in the 1970s, headsets were the big thing. That was also when the pilot population started its decline, so industry started easing the requirements to make private pilot training less intimidating. Who remembers the heated debates on the need for spin training?

FAA Updates Training Standards & Manuals

April 2, 2012 by Scott Spangler

Back in the paper era I was filled with two-part dread every time the FAA’s Airman Testing Standards Branch had updated its practical test standards (PTS) and aviation training handbooks. Part I was the expense of keeping my training library up to date. Part II was discovering what had changed.

Digital publishing and Internet distribution has retired dread Part I. So the recent notice that it had revised three practical test standards and three handbooks:

PTS: Private Pilot Airplane (FAA-S-8081-14B, effective June 1, 2012); Commercial Pilot Airplane (FAA-S-8081-12C, effective June 1, 2012); and Parachute Rigger (FAA-S-8081-25B, effective July 1, 2012).

Handbooks: Aviation Maintenance Technician—Powerplant (2 volumes, FAA-H-8083-31); Aviation Maintenance Technician—Airframe (2 volumes, FAA-H-8083-32); and Flight Navigator (FAA-H-8083-18) .

Really? There’s still a flight navigator certificate, in the GPS-guided 21st century? Curiosity demands that I check that out before I assess my Part II dread in the PTS and Handbooks.