The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has proposed the Enhanced Qualification Program less as a way to reduce pilot training requirements but rather as a means to provide expedited curriculum to improve the industry-wide aircrew shortage. The EQP and Designated Pilot Examiner (DPE) initiatives aim to streamline pilot training pipelines and reduce check ride bottlenecks, though their full effects are still rolling out.

The EQP is working to set standards for air carriers and schools to provide nationally standardized training focused on airline operations for restricted-privileges airline transport pilot (R-ATP) candidates. According to the Government Accountability Office, DPE is designed to produce more instructors that will be available to give check rides. It is also intended to create better oversight and evaluation aiming to ease these scheduling bottlenecks.

Even though Congress mandated this program in 2024 due to heavy lobbying from regional airlines, the agency still has not officially released it nearly two years later. Additionally, the recent fatal mishap in Miami, which is still under investigation, appears to be largely due to pilot error based on initial evidence. If officially determined to be so, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is likely to recommend greater scrutiny of pilot training, which could delay EQP and DPE rollout for additional review.

What The Enhanced Qualification Program Actually Does

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The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 mandated the establishment of EQP under Part 121 or Part 142 certificate holders. It creates an alternative, structured pathway to an R-ATP certificate. The curriculum derives from an established type rating practical test standard. The training pipeline is described as a sequential five-phase process.

In EQP’s Phase I, assessments focus on foundational airline operations and academic preparation. Successfully completing Phase I grants the candidate the equivalent of an Airline Transport Pilot Certification Training Program (ATP-CTP) graduation certificate. Phase II and Phase III cover general transport-category academic training. These phases transition the pilot from single-pilot commercial operations into jet aerodynamics, automation, flight management systems (FMS), and multi-crew environments.

In Phase IV of EQP, the practical multi-crew simulation is introduced. This course focuses on Crew Resource Management (CRM), Threat and Error Management (TEM), and adherence to Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in a flight simulation training device (FSTD). The program culminates in Phase V, which is a comprehensive maneuvers evaluation.

The final evaluation is conducted in a full-motion Level C or D Full Flight Simulator (FFS) and is structured around the same testing parameters of a traditional FAA type rating practical test. It’s meant to verify the pilot’s proficiency to transition directly into an air carrier’s initial operating experience (IOE).

NTSB Recommendations On The Horizon

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The FAA must strike a balance between its safety charter and congressional obligations to expedite training and keep the American aviation industry competitive. However, following the 2 1 Air Boeing 767 runway overrun at Miami International Airport (MIA), it is anticipated that the NTSB may recommend more stringency. If the agency recommends to the FAA heightened training intensity, the goal of expediting the pipeline of a student pilot to the flight deck of a commercial airliner could become much more challenging.

The black boxes pulled from the crash on September 6 have so far indicated no mechanical errors with the aircraft or obvious weather phenomena, but rather poor decision-making on the part of the air crew. Although the full investigation will take months or even a year, the NTSB has released preliminary data which currently only supports the theory that the pilots incorrectly handled the unstable approach and killed five bystanders as a result.

This accident creates an immediate conflict between a congressional mandate to speed up the pilot pipeline and the NTSB’s independent authority to demand stricter safety standards after a major mishap. EQP is designed to let pilots trade hundreds of traditional flight hours for highly structured, high-fidelity simulator training focused on crew resource management and standard operating procedures.

The Balancing Act That Keeps America Flying, Safely

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The FAA acts as the regulator and promoter of civil aviation, while the NTSB functions as an entirely independent, non-regulatory investigative body. If the NTSB formally concludes that current multi-crew training failed to prevent the Miami crash, the FAA cannot simply release the EQP rules as they are currently written. The agency may be forced to stall the rollout and completely rewrite the program’s final phases to incorporate the NTSB’s new safety mandates.

The NTSB’s role is to ensure the airspace remains safe by conducting exhaustive, forensic investigations of accidents and issuing safety recommendations based purely on factual findings. Because the NTSB holds no regulatory or enforcement power, its recommendations are not legally binding. This lack of implementation in the past several years has led to frustration expressed by NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy.

In 2022, Homendy commented to AVweb after a crash in Hawaii that claimed the lives of seven people:

“The NTSB previously made 11 recommendations to the FAA to prevent accidents like this one, but our recommendations only work when they are implemented. It’s time for the FAA to act. When the NTSB issues safety recommendations, they are data-driven, supported by factual evidence developed from investigations, and are carefully crafted to prevent accidents.”

While Homendy did not explicitly call out the 2019 Hawaii skydiving crash by name during her initial press briefings, her recent public commentary mirrors the same rhetorical tone. In the aftermath of the crash of 21 Air flight 7598, Homendy commented: “We can only work to prevent the next one if, at the end of an investigation, recommendations are implemented.” So, in light of this tragic accident, more changes may be very much coming in the near future to aviation training in the United States.

Why The FAA Refuses To Touch The 1,500-Hour Rule

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The current baseline for national flight training is derived from the legislative framework established after the 2009 Colgan Air Flight 3407 crash that killed 50 people. That mishap resulted in a mandate the following year to increase the minimum flight time for airline co-pilots from 250 hours to 1,500 hours. While regional carriers initially criticized this threshold, the regulations also allowed for specific exemptions. The FAA allowed for restricted licenses to be issued after 1,250 hours for candidates with an associate’s degree and 1,000 hours for bachelor’s degree graduates.

EQP does not lower the training standards or absolute proficiency requirements. Instead, it reallocates how a portion of those hours are spent. Under the current baseline system, a student pilot typically finishes a commercial pilot certificate in approximately 250 hours. To satisfy the remaining 1,250 hours needed for the standard 1,500-hour requirement, pilots are left on their own to build time.

Instead of flying a basic trainer plane in circles, the student’s time is reallocated into a structured, multi-crew flight deck environment. This achieves a faster timeline because the training is continuous, condensed, and not impacted by weather. It theoretically yields a higher-quality pilot thanks to a higher volume of hours logged in transport-category jet simulators.

The DPE national oversight initiative mirrors this strategy by targeting administrative waste during the checking phase. When a pilot completes their hours and curriculum, they frequently face an administrative standstill, waiting weeks or months for an available local examiner. The DPE national oversight framework reallocates existing examiner resources to match where demand is highest.

Why The FAA Still Has Not Issued It

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The statutory deadline for the FAA to establish the EQP framework was November 16, 2024. The agency failed to meet this deadline. An April GAO report confirmed that while the FAA finalized the administrative requirements internally within the mandated timeframe, the agency experienced protracted delays in converting these internal metrics into public guidance.

As of February, the administrative package remained bottlenecked in the formal review pipeline without a publication schedule. The GAO formally recommended the FAA publish a definitive release timeline so that aviation colleges and flight schools can develop curriculum in compliance. It is also necessary to formalize airline partnerships. That will be vital to expediting the overall training timeline.

Although the Department of Transportation concurred with the GAO’s findings, it declined to commit to a release date. This institutional stagnation carries a tangible operational burden for the industry. This administrative inertia is not isolated to the EQP initiative. DPE has followed an identical trajectory of missed milestones, compounding the exact training and checking bottlenecks that Congress intended Section 372 to alleviate.

The DPE Office Running Into The Same Wall

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DPE will overhaul the slow-moving administrative and oversight process that is currently blamed for check ride backlog bottleneck. Rather than changing flight training for the student, it reorganizes how the FAA manages the examiners who administer practical tests. Under the old system, individual Flight Standards District Offices managed examiners regionally, which means there are geographic disparities in examiner availability and local testing standards.

The new process centralizes everything under a single National Coordination and Oversight Office. This national office actively tracks regional scheduling wait times to reallocate examiners to high-demand areas where student pilots are waiting weeks for a check-ride. It also standardizes policy deployment so that an Airman Certification Standard test is identical regardless of the state in which it is taken.

Another major operational piece of this new process is the implementation of a mandatory Post-Activity Survey System. Whether a test ends in a pass or failure, the applicant receives a standardized survey. This data goes to the centralized national office to track metrics like examiner professionalism, adherence to the ACS, and any issues with fees.

It gives the FAA insight from the student point of view to identify and address outliers like instructors with unusually high failure rates. The national office will monitor daily and monthly check-ride data to optimize examiner scheduling and standardize retest priorities for students who fail. The goal being to ensure they can get re-evaluated quickly without resetting their training timelines.