Impact of Covid-19 on pilot training – January update

At FlightLogger, we have been monitoring and reporting on the level of activities going on in the pilot training business, based on data from more than 110 pilot training organizations using the FlightLogger platform worldwide.

Every month we post an update with our most recent statistics and this update is based on data gathered during December 2020.

Pilot training activity levels continue to fall

As you could read in our last update a month ago, our strongest data parameter for the level of pilot training activities, the average number of active students per pilot academy, took a 4,5 percent dive in November.

The entire world faced a severe second wave of the Corona virus, which has only gone worse in December, where the only good news were that the first vaccines started to be deployed in most countries just before New Year. And not surprisingly, the statistics for December show a further decrease in activities by 6,1 percent compared to the previous month.

Compared to the pre-Covid19 situation (97,2 students in February 2020), December activities were down to 84,3 percent of that.

The other source of data that we monitor these months is the activity level measured by the total number of flights registered by pilot training organizations using the FlightLogger platform. Looking at this data, we see a huge decrease of activities, which itself would be extremely worrying, if it wasn’t for the fact that the development follows the same pattern seen around the end of each year. The graph shown below clearly depicts a negative spike each year in December/January, and this year is of course no exception, since it is mainly caused by fact that winter conditions put a limit to the training activities in pilot academies. Based on the history of FlightLogger, even though FlightLogger continues to get new customers from all regions of the world,  there is still  a majority of customers based in the northern hemisphere.

However, we do expect that the number of weekly flights will fall to a lower level compared with previous years due to the negative impacts of Covid19, but we will not be able to make conclusions on this until next month.

Expectations for the winter months

The question of how pilot training activities will develop during the coming months is difficult for anybody to answer, since there are currently at least two big factors effecting this:

• long term pilot demand outlooks
• short term impact of Covid19 including effects of the vaccines deployed in the coming months

At FlightLogger, we have a principle of not making any predictions on the future need for pilots and how fast the industry will recover, but we have seen predictions become increasingly positive in general. When it comes to the current situation, we, like most others, see a big impact of the second (or third) wave of the virus across more or less the entire world. From our point of view, it makes sense to settle in for some tough winter months, where we should expect a wide range of restrictions, that will expectedly also affect pilot training activities substantially.

In other words, we foresee some difficult months for the training industry before things hopefully start to get better in the spring with a little help from the vaccines.

We will post another update on the state of pilot training in the beginning of February. To receive future updates on the state of pilot training following Covid-19, along with other interesting insights from FlightLogger, we recommend that you subscribe to our newsletter by filling out the form in the footer of this page.