The flight school I currently work at normally has about 13 - 14 instructors. Now we're down to 5. We're bringing on a new CFI that I trained in March, but then again I'll be leaving in March so that doesn't do any good.

Another problem I see is that there's not going to be many instructors qualified to train new ones. For part 61 instructors, you have to have 2 years of experience and 200 hours of instruction to train initial CFI applicants.

For part 141 instructors, you must have an 80 percent pass rate (4 out of 5) and given 400 hours of instruction. This one's not so much a problem at busy flight schools, but part 61 guys have to wait 2 years. Not many instructors are hanging around that long.

It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.