the key is to equate that number of completed private pilots against those
that held a student certificate
and then to key in on the number of pilots who earned their first rating
under the age of 18
and compare those numbers to the US or world wide population..

BT

"Jim Logajan" wrote in message
.. .
Jay Honeck wrote:
In short, I thought it would be neat to figure out how many pilots
have EVER flown, since 1903. It's easy to get the number of US pilots
year-by-year, but (of course) these include duplicates over time.
Therefore, I'm stumped.

Any ideas how to tabulate this figure?

Not a clue about worldwide, but for the U.S. one can make a "reasonable"
estimate based on FAA stats at this link:

http://www.faa.gov/data_statistics/a...atistics/2006/

Table 17 in particular seems to suggest that, excluding student pilot
certificates, ~25,000 private certificates were issued each year for the
last 10 years. I'd use that amount as an average and multiply it by ~60
to get on the order of at least ~1.5 million private pilot certificates
ever issued in the U.S.

Just my attempt at a swag.