The Gravity of Flight Training Changes

When Sir Isaac Newton was messing around with math he came up with some truisms that actually extend beyond the physics behind the apple that he watched falling from a tree (it probably didn’t hit him on the head). His scribbles about equal and opposite reactions became a metaphor for life in a lot of cases, and for some reason the plight of that Flower of Kent orb (the type of apple incorrectly accused of braining the world’s first physicist) helped me connect the dots on some trends I’ve been noticing but have been unable to explain. Most of them have to do with the increasingly tense relations between airports and their neighbors.

We have been inundated with reports from pilots at small airports reporting major operational changes that seemingly came out of the blue. They fall into two basic categories (landing fees and increased hangar rents) and the latest report from the FAA on pilot statistics kind of explains the origin of one side of that ledger.

First of all, the report shows a massive increase in the number of “active pilots” in the last 10 years. Ignore that preposterous number. There are not almost 900,000 pilots fighting for air, runway, and hangar space in the U.S. About 40% of that figure is student pilots and we all know that there aren’t 370,286 budding aviators punishing landing gear and trying the patience of controllers across the country. That number is bogus because the FAA stopped expiring student pilot permits in 2016 and they have been accumulating since. Soon they’ll go exponential, I guess.

At any rate, that statistical boondoggle throws a wrench into any superficial assessment of the statistics, but if you look closely enough there is still some useful information in there.

Three stats caught my eye. The number of private pilots was in decline until it bottomed out at just less than 161,000 in 2020. It has climbed briskly since then to a total of 174,155 in 2025. That looks like an incredible boost for GA except few of those new private pilots are primarily interested in fly-ins, flour drops, and flying Young Eagles. In that same period of time, the number of commercial pilots increased by almost exactly the same number as has the number of airline transport pilots. Clearly the figures reflect the rush to satisfy the “pilot shortage” we’ve been hearing about, and the figures show a huge number of newly minted commercial pilots ready and waiting to accumulate the 1,500 hours they will need to warm the right seat of an RJ.

Which takes us back to your local airport and some new developments on the flight training front. That kind of surge in flight training means a whole lot of touch and goes and other annoying flying behavior that has dominated the agendas at homeowners associations all over the country. The surge in flight training has been accompanied by a surge in lawsuits (most of them futile) and the imposition of landing fees all over the country trying to make the noise go away.

There is an interesting tangent developing in that some HOAs, which have expensively realized that decades of case law have determined that the amount of noise they have to endure is entirely up to the FAA and the free-market demand for flight training, which appears to be quite brisk, are trying a different tack. Instead of suing over disrupted backyard barbecues, they’re alleging mass poisoning by leaded fuel emissions. It will be interesting to see the courts’ reaction, particularly in light of the painful process to find a universally acceptable unleaded avgas. But I digress. That’s a different kind of noise entirely.

The landing fees so far simply move the problem. Flight schools, like most businesses, want to locate in population centers so they have access to the customers they need. There are some airports in the arid Southwest with a half a dozen or more training facilities, some of the pumping out hundreds of future airline pilots a year. When landing fees are imposed, the students do their pattern work at airports that don’t have fees and the home airport fees are absorbed in the training costs.

Now those neighboring airports are also imposing landing fees and, with the help of third-party collection services that log ADS-B data to bill the owners of aircraft, airport associations are raking in some cash while keeping peace with airport neighbors. The based aircraft operators are howling about the fees and relief may be coming in the form of a new law banning the use of ADS-B data for collecting fees but that, too, is another type of noise.

And there’s also that old saw that we in aviation like to use when the neighbors get noisy. “You knew the airport was here when you moved in” has served us well as a smugly superior rejoinder when the HOA comes calling. But now one of the largest creators of epaulettes in the U.S. is testing that dynamic. As we report in the news section, Embry-Riddle is looking to pave a patch of leased desert near its Prescott, Arizona, campus entirely for pattern work.

There aren’t a lot of homes in the area but there are some and there’s also a large Buddhist monastery nearby, too. You can bet the families and monks who moved to the wide-open spaces didn’t count on a barebones airport buzzing with Cessnas and Diamond twins being plunked in their midst.

And finally, the stats likely have something to do with a controversy gathering steam over the future of Part 141 training. I’m guessing the rewrite was prompted, at least in part, by the inefficiencies exposed by this latest surge in training for the airlines. Some of the current regs are 50 years old and bound to be anachronistic in the current training environment. Certainly the talk in the industry is that the rewrite is going to streamline airline pilot training but not help the Part 61 schools whose training isn’t geared to the production of right-seaters.

Newton was only thinking about the elegantly calculable effects of energy, matter, and inertia when he shaded himself under that apple tree, but his ciphering ended up explaining the way the universe works and brought us things like engineering and the ability to obliterate ourselves with the power of the atom. I have no predictions for the impact of 14,000 new airline pilots in an industry that suddenly doesn’t need them anymore, but it appears to be far-reaching. It will be interesting to watch this particular universe unfold.