Impact of Covid-19 on pilot training – February update

At FlightLogger, we are monitoring and reporting on the level of activities going on in the pilot training business, based on data from more than 116 pilot training organisations 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 January 2021.

Fourth consecutive month with falling activity

During both October, November and December 2020, the total activity level measured by average number of active students per academy took a fall as described in our previous updates. Despite our best hopes, this tendency has shown to continue in our January data, where the average number of active students per academy fell from 82,0 to 78,6, thereby representing a 4,2% decrease compared to December 2020.

Compared to September, where the recovery after the pandemic’s first wave looked the best, the January statistics are now 14,7% lower.

Without doubt, the general pilot training activity level is hugely impacted during the winter season of the northern hemisphere, where the majority of our partners are operating from. In some countries, strict lockdowns simply prevent most or all flight training activities, while other regions are not as heavily affected.

Unfortunately, there’s little sign of those restrictions being lifted before spring, which means we do not expect too many signs of recovery in February.

Number of registered flights confirms a challenging season

As we have also done in the previous months, we follow the activity level by another interesting parameter, the number of weekly flights registered by our partners.

Looking isolated at January compared to where the December numbers ended, things could seem positive, but unfortunately this is not the case.

As explained in our January update, and as you can see in the graph below, we each year at the end of December see a big dip in the number of registered flights, followed by a swift recovery in January. Last month, our December data followed the same trend, but comparing our January recovery to the ones we have seen previous years, it’s obvious that the number of flights have not recovered at the same speed this year.

This confirms the tendency seen in the average number of active students and the fact that many training organizations are challenged by the current situation, unable to complete as many training flights as they normally would.

Expectations for the remaining European winter months

We still see the same two big factors determining how things will evolve from here:

• 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 are happy to see that most experts foresee a rather quick recovery where there will still be a need for new pilot students.

On the short term, we would as already mentioned be surprised to see the above numbers improve significantly before the Covid-19 vaccines together with the warmth of the spring allow for restrictions to be lifted.

In other words, we still foresee some challenging months for especially those training organisations situated in the Northern hemisphere, where the current climate is making conditions worse.

We will post our next update on the state of pilot training in the beginning of March. 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.