How many pilots, ever?

They said on some educational show, that at any given time there is
approximately 250,000 people aloft in aircraft, the world over.

Jim Logajan wrote:

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.