Pilot Certificates And Ratings, In Order
Seven rungs, each with a minimum age, a prerequisite and a paragraph of federal regulation behind it. Schools sell the rungs one at a time. What is worth understanding before you buy any of them is the order, because getting the order wrong is the most expensive avoidable mistake in a flying career and it is usually made in the first six months.
What Order Do Pilot Certificates Come In?
Student, private, instrument, commercial, then whichever add-on ratings the plan needs, then flight instructor, then airline transport pilot. Certificates and ratings are different objects: a certificate is a level of privilege, a rating attaches to one and says what you may fly or in what conditions. The instrument rating and the multi-engine class rating both attach; neither is a certificate.
The order is not arbitrary and it is not entirely fixed either. Instrument before commercial is a choice rather than a requirement, and it is the right choice for almost everybody heading toward an airline, because commercial training then happens with a pilot who can already hold altitude and heading without looking outside.
Where people go wrong is at the top and the bottom. At the bottom they buy an expensive airplane for the first phase, which teaches systems management before it teaches flying. At the top they add ratings speculatively, before knowing which of them the career actually needs.
Everything below carries the regulation that sets it, because ages and prerequisites are the two things most often stated wrongly in this industry and both are trivially checkable.
What Is The Difference Between A Certificate And A Rating?
A certificate is a level of privilege. A rating is an attachment to a certificate saying what you are permitted to fly, or in what conditions. Private pilot and commercial pilot are certificates. Instrument and multi-engine are ratings. There is no such thing as a multi-engine certificate, and a school that offers one is being loose with its language in a way worth noticing.
The distinction matters commercially, not just pedantically. A certificate has to be earned in sequence: 14 CFR 61.123(h) will not issue a commercial certificate to somebody who does not already hold a private one. A rating can be added at almost any point once the certificate beneath it exists, and 14 CFR 61.63(c)(3) attaches no training-time floor at all to an added class rating.
So the certificates fix your order and the ratings fix your timing. You cannot reorder the first group. You can, and should, argue hard about when to buy the second, because a rating bought years before it is used decays in both currency and skill while its price sits on a loan statement.
Read the ladder below as two interleaved lists rather than one. The rungs that are certificates are the spine. The rungs that are ratings are decisions.
What Are The Seven Rungs?
Each one names the rule that governs it. Ages are minimums for the certificate itself; the aeronautical experience sits in a separate section and is linked from each rating page.
Student Pilot Certificate — 61.83
From sixteen for anything other than a glider or balloon, and fourteen for those. English proficiency is required. It is not a course and not an examination: it is the document that lets an instructor endorse you to fly alone, and it needs a medical certificate behind it before you can use it.
Private Pilot Certificate — 61.103
From seventeen. Requires a knowledge test, an instructor endorsement, the aeronautical experience at 61.109 and a practical test. This is the phase where most of the flying is learned, and the one that most rewards flying often. Three prices here: $10,900, then $15,900, then $22,500.
Instrument Rating — 61.65
A rating, not a certificate. 61.65(d) asks for fifty cross-country hours flown as pilot in command, ten of those in an airplane; forty hours in actual or simulated instrument conditions, fifteen of them received from an instructor; and an instrument cross-country of 250 nautical miles with an approach at each airport. $11,700 here.
Commercial Pilot Certificate — 61.123
From eighteen, and a private certificate has to be in hand first. 61.129(a) sets 250 hours of flight time. Inside it: 100 hours flown in powered aircraft; 100 hours as pilot in command; twenty hours of training, of which ten are instrument and ten are in a complex, turbine or technically advanced airplane; and ten hours flown solo or performing the duties of pilot in command.
Additional Class And Type Ratings — 61.63
The multi-engine class rating lives here, and 61.63(c) sets no minimum hour figure for adding a class rating. Ten to fifteen hours is typical in practice. $5,100 here, flown in the Piper Seminole, and it is a rating on your existing certificate rather than a new certificate.
Flight Instructor Certificate — 61.183
From eighteen. Beneath it sits a commercial certificate or an ATP whose category and class rating matches, an instrument rating where the sought rating calls for one, and a knowledge test covering the fundamentals of instructing. This is the rung where you start being paid to fly instead of paying to.
Airline Transport Pilot Certificate — 61.153
From twenty-three, or from twenty-one where the reduced experience at 61.160 applies. 61.159(a) sets 1,500 hours total time with 500 cross-country, 100 night, 50 in the class of airplane and 75 instrument inside it. Nothing on this site sells this rung; it is earned.
Where Does The Medical Certificate Sit In This Order?
Before all of it. A medical examination is the one item on this ladder that can end the plan outright, and it is among the least expensive items on it. Sitting one in your first fortnight converts an unknown into a fact while you have spent almost nothing.
The classes map onto the ladder in a straightforward way. 14 CFR 61.23(a)(3) makes at least a third-class certificate the condition for flying solo as a student and for exercising private pilot privileges. Commercial privileges want second class. Exercising pilot-in-command privileges of an airline transport pilot certificate wants first class, under 61.23(a)(1).
Anybody serious about the top of this ladder should sit the first-class examination at the bottom of it. It costs no more anxiety than the third-class one and it answers the question that actually matters. The standards live in part 67. 67.103 asks for distant acuity of 20/20 or sharper, tested one eye at a time, correction permitted; near acuity of 20/40 read at sixteen inches; a further reading at thirty-two inches once you are fifty; colour perception sufficient for airman duties; and visual fields within normal limits.
Only an Aviation Medical Examiner can tell you how your own history reads against those paragraphs. Not a forum, not a school, and not this page.
Which Hours Count Twice, And Which Do Not Count At All?
The reason the order in the ladder is worth arguing about is that the same flight hour can satisfy two paragraphs at once, or one, or none. That is where the money is won and lost.
The Cross-Country Overlap
The instrument rating at 14 CFR 61.65(d) asks for fifty hours of cross-country time flown as pilot in command, ten of them in an airplane. The commercial certificate at 61.129(a)(2)(ii) asks for fifty hours of cross-country flight inside its hundred hours of pilot-in-command time. Those are not two separate fifty-hour blocks. Flown deliberately, a large part of one satisfies the other.
This is the single strongest argument for taking the instrument rating before the commercial certificate rather than after it. Do it in that order and much of the cross-country flying you are already required to buy is flown usefully, in the system, on a clearance. Do it the other way and you fly the same hours twice, the second time learning nothing new.
- 61.65(d)(1): fifty cross-country hours logged as pilot in command, ten in an airplane
- 61.129(a)(2): one hundred pilot-in-command hours, fifty of them cross-country
- One well-planned set of trips can serve both paragraphs
The Hours That Buy Nothing
Not every hour flown does regulatory work. Circuits at the home field build handling and currency and count toward almost no specific requirement past the private certificate. Time flown in a twin before you need a twin is expensive time that a single would have bought more of. And an hour flown without an instructor, in an aircraft you already handle comfortably, in weather you already fly in, is an hour of entertainment rather than progress.
None of that means such flying is worthless. It means it should be a choice made knowingly rather than a default that shows up as a shortfall at hour 240.
- Pattern work: currency and skill, little regulatory credit past the private certificate
- Twin time bought early: the most expensive way to log an hour
- Solo hours in familiar conditions: real, and not the same as training
The Two Rungs That Are Not Sold
Two things on this ladder cannot be bought from anybody, and it is worth saying so on a page that also sells training. The first is the flight time separating a 250-hour commercial certificate from a 1,500-hour airline transport pilot certificate. That is earned in employment, usually by instructing, and any provider offering to sell it to you is selling something other than what it appears to be.
The second is a job. This school has no relationship with any airline, and the ladder ends where the regulation ends.
- 250 hours: 14 CFR 61.129(a), the commercial floor
- 1,500 hours: 14 CFR 61.159(a), the unrestricted ATP floor
- The gap between them is worked, not purchased
Can You Reach An ATP With Fewer Than 1,500 Hours?
Yes, through 14 CFR 61.160, and only through the specific routes it names. Each carries a lower total-time floor in exchange for a qualification, and each still requires 200 hours of cross-country time under 61.160(e) rather than the 500 that 61.159(a)(1) asks.
Military Route — 61.160(a)
The lowest floor in the section, for a serving or former United States military pilot able to produce the documentation the paragraph requires.
- Total Time750 hours
- Cross-Country200 hours under 61.160(e)
- Age21, per 61.153(a)
Bachelor’s Degree With An Aviation Major — 61.160(b)
Requires an institution of higher education with FAA authorisation and sixty semester credit hours of aviation coursework.
- Total Time1,000 hours
- Credit Hours60 semester hours
- Also NeedsCommercial with an instrument rating
Associate Degree, Or A Partial Bachelor’s — 61.160(c) And (d)
Thirty semester credit hours of aviation coursework at an authorised institution reaches the same floor by either route.
- Total Time1,250 hours
- Credit Hours30 semester hours
- Route (d)Fewer than 60, at least 30
What The Restricted Certificate Costs You
61.160(g) subjects a certificate obtained under the section to pilot-in-command limitations. It is a real certificate with a real constraint, and the constraint lifts on reaching the full experience.
- LimitationPilot in command, per 61.160(g)
- Unrestricted At1,500 hours — 61.159(a)
- Age Unrestricted23 — 61.153(a)
Which Rung Changes A Flying Career Most?
The flight instructor certificate, and it is not close. Every rung before it is bought. From that rung on, flying generally pays rather than costs, and the arithmetic of the whole career inverts at that single point.
14 CFR 61.183 sets what it takes: eighteen years of age, a commercial or airline transport pilot certificate underneath with the matching category and class, an instrument rating where the sought rating requires one, a knowledge test on the fundamentals of instructing, a knowledge test on the rating itself, spin training with an endorsement for airplane ratings, at least fifteen hours logged as the pilot in command of that same category and class, and a practical test.
It is also the rung where most people say they learned to fly properly. Explaining a lazy eight aloud to a student who has never seen one exposes every part of it you had been doing by feel, and the exposure is uncomfortable and useful in equal measure.
The honest downside: instructing is a job, with a schedule and cancellations and students who are not ready, and it takes one to two years at a normal tempo to close the gap to 1,500 hours. Anybody who tells you that phase is short has not done it.
What Does Each Rung Cost?
Published figures for every rung this school sells, and an honest blank where it does not. The career track buys the whole ladder up to a flight instructor rating for one number; the individual phases are also sold separately.
Airline Career Track
Every phase from the first logged hour to a flight instructor rating, priced once and fixed at the point of enrolment.
- ✓Five phases under a single number
- ✓Financing from $2,500 down
- ✓No repricing at a phase boundary
- ✓Part 61 from start to finish
Private Pilot — Comprehensive
Sixty hours in the logbook: fifty-five airborne, five in the box, fifty flown dual, plus ten hours of ground school.
- ✓60 hours logged
- ✓5 simulator sessions
- ✓10 hours of ground school
- ✓Books and materials included
Instrument Rating
Phase two of the career route, and the rating that changes how you fly more than any other single step.
- ✓40 instrument hours under 61.65(d)
- ✓An IFR cross-country of 250 nautical miles
- ✓Fixed at enrolment
Multi-Engine Add-On
The class rating that opens twin-engine flying, and later the ability to instruct in one.
- ✓No hour floor under 61.63(c)(3)
- ✓Ten to fifteen hours is typical
- ✓Fixed at enrolment
What Should You Ask Any School About The Sequence?
Five questions that separate a school teaching a ladder from a school selling rungs. Ours are answered here; ask anybody else the same five.
Which Aircraft Sits On Which Rung
The single-engine trainers carry the private certificate and most of the instrument rating. The Piper Arrow II carries the complex training 14 CFR 61.129(a)(3)(ii) wants inside the commercial hours. The Piper Seminole carries the multi-engine class rating. Six types, all on our own books rather than leased in.
Who Teaches Above The Private Certificate
Eleven instructors, each holding a commercial certificate or an ATP, an instructor certificate above it and a medical in date. Enough of them that a seven-rung sequence does not stall on one calendar, and you may change instructor without changing school.
What The Simulator Is Used For
A Redbird MCX, full-motion and fully enclosed. Procedures, radio work and instrument scan, which is where a box earns its keep. Not landings, where it teaches something a student then has to unlearn. $189 for a standalone session, and no session has been lost to weather.
Whether The Weather Will Hold The Tempo
Across the year ending 1 August 2026, NOAA ASOS observations at this field admitted 355 days: a ceiling holding at 3,000 feet, visibility at five statute miles, and four qualifying hours of daylight before a day was counted. We publish the threshold beside the figure so you can argue with it.
Whether The Price Moves Between Rungs
Every program figure is printed on the site. No spreads, no block rates, no figure withheld until you enquire. What you sign for is what the page said, and repricing at a rung boundary does not happen here.
What Is Handed Over Before Payment
The syllabus for the rung you are buying and the training agreement with its refund terms, both before money moves rather than after. A school unwilling to do that is telling you something about the rest of the relationship.
Does The Order Change If You Are Not Heading For An Airline?
Yes, in one place. A pilot who wants a commercial certificate for work flown in visual conditions can reasonably defer the instrument rating or leave it out entirely, because 14 CFR 61.123 does not require it for the certificate.
That decision has a cost attached further up. 61.183(c) wants an instrument rating behind a flight instructor certificate where the rating sought calls for one, so the rating tends to come back into the plan later, at a point where it is being bought under time pressure rather than chosen.
For everybody else the order below is the one to follow, and the argument for it is not tradition. It is that instrument flying makes the commercial manoeuvres easier to learn, that the cross-country hours overlap, and that a pilot who can work inside the air traffic system has a much larger set of employers to talk to than one who cannot.
Take a position, since this page said it would: absent a concrete reason to do otherwise, fly the instrument rating second. The people who regret that order are far outnumbered by the people who regret the other one.
Instrument Second Or Instrument Fourth?
The same seven rungs, climbed in two different orders. The certificates cannot move. The instrument rating can, and this is what moves with it.
The Two Sequences, Side By Side
| What Changes | Instrument Second | Instrument Fourth |
|---|---|---|
| Order | Private, instrument, commercial, multi, instructor | Private, commercial, multi, instrument, instructor |
| Cross-Country Hours | Flown once, credited toward 61.65(d) and 61.129(a) | Largely flown twice |
| Commercial Training | Begun by a pilot who already flies accurately on instruments | Begun on visual skills alone |
| Instructor Certificate | Instrument rating already in hand for 61.183(c) | Rating bought under deadline |
| Weather Days | Usable for instrument work | Lost |
| Suits | Anyone aiming at an airline | Visual commercial work only |
| Published Price Of The Rating | $11,700 | $11,700 |
| Our Position | Recommended | Defensible in one narrow case |
What Can Be Verified About How This Ladder Is Taught?
The ages and hour figures above are all in public regulation and can be read in ten minutes. What follows is the part that is about this school rather than about the rules.
Airframe Types On The Ramp, Owned Rather Than Brokered
Cessna 162 Skycatcher, Piper Warrior, Piper Arrow II, Diamond DA20, Cirrus SR22 Turbo and Piper Seminole. The airplanes belong to the operation, so the maintenance calendar is ours and not a lessor’s.
Inspected under 14 CFR 91.409(b)Instructors Working Here
Each carries a commercial certificate or an ATP beneath, an instructor certificate above it, and a medical in date. You are matched with one of them, and you may ask for another if the fit is wrong.
14 CFR 61.183 · 61.23 · 61.195Training-Capable Days Measured Across Twelve Months At This Field
Counted from NOAA ASOS observations for the year ending 1 August 2026, admitting a day only where the ceiling held at 3,000 feet with five statute miles of visibility across four qualifying daylight hours.
NOAA ASOS via the Iowa Environmental MesonetA Session In The Full-Motion Simulator
Two of those sessions sit inside the Standard and the Premium private pilot programs and five inside the Comprehensive, and weather never takes one away.
Published, not quoted on requestProgram Prices Withheld Until You Enquire
None. Every program figure is printed on the site, nothing is offered as a spread, and the price you sign for is the one you read.
Stated rather than impliedQuestions About The Order
Student, private, instrument rating, commercial, any additional class ratings, flight instructor, then airline transport pilot. The instrument rating and the multi-engine rating are ratings that attach to a certificate rather than certificates in their own right, which is the distinction most often blurred.
A student pilot certificate is sixteen under 14 CFR 61.83. A private certificate is seventeen under 61.103. Both a commercial certificate at 61.123 and a flight instructor certificate at 61.183 are eighteen. An airline transport pilot certificate is twenty-three under 61.153, dropping to twenty-one where the reduced experience route at 61.160 applies.
Yes. Under 14 CFR 61.123 a commercial applicant holds a private pilot certificate issued under part 61 already, or else meets 61.73 instead. There is no route that skips the private certificate and arrives directly at a commercial one.
Not by 61.123, and it is still the right order for almost anybody heading toward an airline. Commercial training demands precision and a lot of cross-country flying, both of which come easier to a pilot who already flies accurately on instruments, and the hours then serve two purposes rather than one.
A minimum of 250 hours of flight time, set by 14 CFR 61.129(a) where the rating sought is airplane single-engine. Inside it: 100 hours flown in powered aircraft; 100 hours as pilot in command; twenty hours of training, ten of them instrument and ten in a complex, turbine or technically advanced airplane; and ten hours flown solo or performing the duties of pilot in command.
A certificate is a level of privilege and a rating is an attachment to it describing what you may fly or in what conditions. Private and commercial are certificates. Instrument and multi-engine are ratings. You do not hold a multi-engine certificate, and a school offering one is being loose with language.
Close to when you need it, not before. It costs $5,100 here, it usually takes ten to fifteen hours because 14 CFR 61.63(c)(3) sets no hour floor for adding a class rating, and both the currency and the handling decay if the rating sits unused. Buying it early is a common and avoidable waste.
Through 14 CFR 61.160(b), with a bachelor’s degree carrying an aviation major from an institution of higher education with FAA authorisation and sixty semester credit hours of aviation coursework. The military route at 61.160(a) reaches 750 hours, and two routes at 61.160(c) and (d) reach 1,250.
The flight instructor certificate. Everything before it is bought and everything after it is generally earned, which is why 61.183 is the most consequential rung on the ladder for anybody funding this themselves. It is also the rung where you learn the most about flying, for reasons every instructor will tell you about.
At the very beginning, before any of it. Solo flight needs a third-class certificate at minimum, by 14 CFR 61.23(a)(3); commercial privileges want second class or better; airline transport pilot command privileges want first. Nothing else in this sequence can end the plan outright, and nothing else is so cheap to test.
What This Page Does Not Promise
Airline Pilot Flight School trains under part 61 of 14 CFR at Van Nuys Airport. It is not an airline and is not owned by one. There is no cadet scheme here, no pathway agreement, no conditional offer and no hiring relationship with any carrier, and no airline is named anywhere on this site.
Reaching a rung on this ladder is not the same as being employed above it. Nothing here promises or implies an interview, a job or a salary, and any training provider that does is describing an outcome it does not control.
No pass rate, no graduate count and no rating of any kind appears on this site. The operation is new; any such figure would come from a sample too small to mean anything, and inventing one is the easiest lie available in this industry. What is published instead is the syllabus, the price, the hours and the federal paragraph behind each requirement.
The ages and hour figures on this page are the current text of the regulation as we read it, with the section number given each time so you can check. Regulations move. Read them at eCFR before you rely on any of them.
Come And See The Aircraft Each Rung Is Flown In
This page is a ladder on a screen. The useful version of it is four airframes on a ramp, in the order you would meet them.
Walk the line and ask which aircraft carries which rung, and why. Ask what the airframe hours are and who signs the maintenance. Ask how many students each instructor is carrying this month, and what happens to your slot when a lesson goes to weather.
Then ask for the two documents that matter: the syllabus for the rung you are considering, and the training agreement with its refund terms. Both are handed over before payment. Read what happens if you stop after the private certificate, because plenty of people stop there and it is a perfectly good place to stop.
The Single-Engine Trainers
Rungs one and two. Cessna 162 Skycatcher, Piper Warrior and Diamond DA20. Sit in all three and notice how different the visibility and the seating position are, because you will spend more hours here than anywhere else on the ladder.
The Piper Arrow II
Gear that folds away and a propeller you have to set, which is the pairing 14 CFR 61.31(e) calls complex and 61.129(a)(3)(ii) wants inside the commercial hours. Ask what the gear and prop actually add to your workload.
The Piper Seminole
The multi-engine rating, bought as the $5,100 add-on. Ask why nobody publishes an hourly figure for it, and then ask what an engine failure after takeoff in a light twin actually demands of a pilot.
The Redbird MCX
Ten minutes inside will show you what a full-motion box is genuinely good at and where it stops being a substitute for an aircraft. We will tell you both halves before you sit down.
The First Rung Costs $229 And Tells You Whether The Other Six Are For You
A student pilot certificate is paperwork and a private certificate is months of work. Between them sits one hour in an airplane with you flying it, which is the one part of this ladder you can test before committing to any of it.
Read The Rung You Are Standing On
The Career Route
The Airline Pilot Training Program, Phase By PhaseHow To Become An Airline PilotAirline Pilot RequirementsHow Long It Takes To Become An Airline PilotHours And The Rules
Airline Pilot Flight Hour RequirementsThe 1,500 Hour RuleRestricted ATP RoutesBuilding Flight HoursEach Rung In Detail
Instrument RatingCommercial Pilot LicenseMulti-Engine RatingCertified Flight InstructorFly The Aeroplane Once, Then Decide
The assessment flight is the first hour of the syllabus and a two-way evaluation. You fly it from the left seat with an instructor beside you, they write down what they saw, and you get an honest read on whether the plan is realistic. It is loggable, and it is credited in full against enrolment if you enroll within 24 hours.
What happens on an assessment flight →