On Wednesday, February 27, 2013 11:43:56 AM UTC-7, son_of_flubber wrote:

I wonder what the real 'uptake capacity' is?

The best estimate based on the number of trainers, tugs and instructors is about 1000 new starts per year in the US. It could be twice that if you take an optimistic view but the number isn't big. To accept a really large number of newcomers, we'd need a huge increase in the number of 2-seat trainers since that's the choke point. We actually have plenty of people with CGI-G certificates, we can fairly quickly increase the number of winches, tugs take longer for all the FAA 337 paperwork but trainers can take years from order to delivery.