If you spend any amount of time around flight training right now, you’ll hear the same complaint over and over again: there aren’t enough DPEs.
Students are waiting weeks, sometimes months, just to get on a schedule. Instructors are juggling timelines. Flight schools are trying to manage expectations. And the conclusion everyone lands on feels obvious — there simply aren’t enough examiners to meet demand. But the more you look at it, the harder it becomes to believe that’s actually the root of the issue.
If this were purely a numbers problem, you’d expect the delays to be consistent. You’d expect everyone to be dealing with roughly the same wait times, the same bottlenecks, the same constraints. Instead, what you see is something much less predictable. Some students get scheduled quickly while others don’t. Some examiners are booked out endlessly, while others seem to have gaps that never quite get filled. That kind of inconsistency usually isn’t caused by a lack of supply. It’s what happens when a system lacks visibility.
Right now, there’s no real transparency into how checkrides are being scheduled, who is available, how long students are actually waiting, or what the experience looks like once they get there. Access tends to flow through informal networks: flight schools that “know someone,” instructors who have preferred examiners, students who happen to be in the right place at the right time. When access depends on relationships instead of information, it creates uneven outcomes by default.
There’s is an inefficiency running underneath all of it. Checkrides that get delayed because a student wasn’t truly ready. Days lost to last-minute cancellations. Retests that could have been avoided with stronger preparation on the front end. None of those things show up when people talk about “the shortage,” but they all consume the same limited resource: examiner time. So what gets labeled as a capacity issue starts to look more like a coordination problem.
That doesn’t mean we don’t need more DPEs. We probably do. But adding more people into a system that lacks transparency and feedback doesn’t fix the underlying friction, it just spreads it around.
If anything is going to improve the experience for students, it’s not just increasing supply. It’s making the process more visible. More predictable. More accountable. Because right now, the hardest part of getting a checkride often isn’t the flying. It’s everything that happens before you ever get there.
If you’ve been through that process—long waits, reschedules, uncertainty—your experience is exactly the kind of data that’s missing. FlyPIREP exists to make that visible. Read what others have gone through, and add your own so the next student isn’t starting from zero.