FAA Airmen Certification
Statistics

Project Overview

This project performs a demographic and longitudinal analysis of the FAA's publicly available Airmen Certification dataset — a registry of all certified pilots and aviation personnel in the United States, updated regularly by the FAA's Civil Aerospace Medical Institute.

The analysis tracks trends in pilot workforce composition over time, examining how certificate types, ratings, and regional distribution have shifted. The resulting dashboard is designed for public-sector audience review, presenting findings in a format consistent with federal reporting standards.

Methodology

The analysis is structured around three analytical lenses — time, geography, and certificate type:

• Data sourced from FAA Data Services airmen certification flat files — publicly available and updated monthly
• Records cleaned and normalized in Python, with certificate type and rating fields standardized across historical snapshots
• Longitudinal analysis constructed by joining annual snapshots to track workforce changes over time
• Geographic distribution mapped at the state level to identify regional concentration of certified airmen
• Certificate type breakdown segmented by Student, Private, Commercial, ATP, and specialty ratings
• Demographic trend analysis applied where age and medical class data are available
• Power BI dashboard built for interactive filtering by state, certificate type, and year range

Dashboard & Charts

Power BI dashboard and supporting Python charts will be embedded here upon project completion.

Key Findings

Findings will be documented here upon analysis completion. Expected outputs include:

• Overall trend in total certified airmen in the U.S. over the past decade
• Certificate types with the highest and lowest growth rates
• States with the highest concentration of active certified pilots
• Age distribution trends across certificate categories
• Impact of the COVID-19 period on new certification rates

Source Code

Full Python analysis code, data pipeline, and documentation available on GitHub.