I was curious to see what the state of the US pilot population looked like, and since you can download a copy of the FAA pilot database, I put my data geek skills to use and did some number crunching. A few things I found were a surprise to me.

1. It’s a professional World out there.

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I found it surprising that there were more professional (Commercial + ATP) pilots than non-professional (Private + Recreational + Sport). Also, the number of ATP pilots is nearly as high as commercial-rated pilots. I personally don’t fly as a full-time profession, and most of the pilots I know don’t either. Certainly there may be people with commercial (or even ATP) ratings that don’t use them professionally, but I was expecting a larger proportion of private pilots, and fewer ATP pilots versus commercial pilots.

2. Commercial pilots without instrument ratings.

Looking at the numbers, about one-fourth of private airplane pilots, and half of commercial airplane pilots have instrument ratings.

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The commercial level statistic is what I found surprising, since there are several restrictions to what you can do with a commercial rating without an instrument rating. Almost every site I’ve seen that discusses becoming a pilot has a progression of private, instrument, commercial. For many, it looks like this isn’t the case.

For helicopters, very few private helicopter pilots have instrument ratings, but about three-fourths of commercial helicopter pilots do.

3. Not many Sport Pilots

The sport pilot rating has been out in the US since 2004, and there are 4,259 licensed sport pilots in the US. That’s certainly more than the number of Recreational-rated pilots (218), but perhaps the sport pilot restrictions are not worth it for the savings in hours and driver’s license medical?

4. A B-52 type rating?

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The FAA database also includes type ratings, and looking through those, the Boeing 737 is the most held type rating overall. Second was the Citation 500 series. If you look waaaaay down the list, there is one pilot with a B-52 type rating. What’s the hourly rate, and where do you rent one of those?

5. Collect them all!

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There are definitely ratings collectors out there, and I suppose the ultimate in that game is collecting type ratings. I was pretty surprised to see that there is one pilot that has 71 type ratings (out of 261 unique types). It would be interesting to see how the FAA deals with putting all of those on one license.

Parting thoughts

I’m curious to see what some of these numbers looked like in the late 70’s, during the general aviation boom times. If anyone happens to have older copies of the FAA pilot database, please drop us a line via our contact page. Did anything surprise you about the data shown above? Let us know in the comments section.

Notes:

This was based on the FAA’s March 2013 database, and excludes pilots with FAA licenses based on foreign licenses. Pilots can opt out of being included in the database, and an unknown number of pilots have done so.