The Flight School Association of North America (FSANA), a dynamic trade association that serves flight training providers and the entire aerospace industry, has shared its understanding of the U.S. flight training aircraft fleet.

FSANA in a short brief has shared interesting figures as quoted below:

“A key factor in training pilots remains the utilization of the resource of aircraft. A question remains of exactly how many aircraft are out there that are currently being used, or are potentially able to be utilized in flight training activities.

FSANA has been studying the GA flight training fleet in the United States. While there is no exact science to calculating the GA training fleet, FSANA estimates that there are 10,000 single and light twin aircraft utilized in day to day training operations.

These estimates include independent flight schools, college based aviation schools and the Flying Club community.

By some estimates, there are approximately 1,600 flight schools throughout our national airspace system. If we estimated an average of approximately 6 aircraft per school (some are much larger and many are smaller).

1,600 x 6 aircraft yields an estimated 9,600 aircraft in the GA flight training fleet.

FSANA estimates that the average number of monthly hours flown per aircraft is 70 hours. Based on the above information, FSANA estimates that there is an estimated 8,064,000 flight training hours flown each year.”

Source: FSANA Announcement

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