IACRA, Explained: How To Register, Get Your FTN And Sign Every FAA Application Without It Bouncing

IACRA is the Integrated Airman Certification and Rating Application, the FAA website at iacra.faa.gov where you apply for every pilot certificate and rating. It replaced the paper FAA Form 8710-1. You fill in and sign the application, your flight instructor recommends you in the same system, and the examiner or FAA inspector issues the result there. Your student pilot certificate, private pilot certificate, instrument rating, commercial and ATP all go through it.

An FTN is your FAA Tracking Number, a permanent identifier IACRA assigns the moment you register as an applicant. It is one letter followed by seven digits. You get it free by creating an account at iacra.faa.gov, and you keep the same one for every application for the rest of your flying career. Write it down: instructors and examiners retrieve your applications by FTN, and PSI testing centres require it to schedule an FAA knowledge test.

Yes. Registering, filing applications and having them processed costs nothing, and there is no app to buy. The only fees on the way to a certificate are the FAA knowledge test, which is paid to the testing centre, and the designated pilot examiner's fee for the checkride. Anyone charging to submit an IACRA application for you is charging for something you can do yourself in twenty minutes.

Yes. Since April 2016 the student pilot certificate is a separate plastic card rather than part of your medical, and it is applied for on IACRA. You can file it in your first week of training with no flight time and no medical yet, you must be 16 for an airplane certificate and able to read, speak, write and understand English, and any flight instructor, examiner, FSDO inspector or airman certification representative can process it. You need the card in hand before your instructor can endorse you to solo.

Filing takes about twenty minutes. Once your instructor has processed and submitted the application, the FAA Airman Registry in Oklahoma City prints the card and mails it, which typically takes around three weeks. Plan for it: if you are two weeks from solo and have not applied, apply today. Student pilot certificates issued since 2016 do not expire.

Almost always because you have not signed it yet. An application is invisible to instructors and examiners until the applicant has completed the Review step and signed electronically. Log in, open the application, go to Review, read the generated 8710-1, and sign with your IACRA username and password. It will then appear when your instructor searches by your FTN. The other cause is a typo in the FTN you gave them.

Not directly. Signing locks the application. If something is wrong, your recommending instructor can return it to you for correction before adding their recommendation, or the application can be deleted and a fresh one started under the same FTN. What cannot be changed after the fact is the certificate or rating type you chose at the start, so read that screen carefully — an instrument rating is an additional rating on your existing certificate, not an original.

Yes. Since January 2020 the FAA's testing provider will not schedule a knowledge test without an FTN, and the score report it prints carries the number so that the examiner can match the test to your IACRA application. Register on IACRA first, then book the written. The test result is valid for 24 calendar months, and the date and score go into the application.

The examiner completes your application in IACRA, you both sign the result electronically, and they print a temporary airman certificate for you on the spot. It is valid for 120 days and carries full privileges, so a new private pilot can carry a passenger on the flight home. The FAA then prints the permanent plastic certificate and mails it to the address in your application. You can confirm it has been issued on the FAA Airmen Inquiry site.

No. Registering again creates a second FTN, and the FAA now has two records of you — your knowledge test is tied to the first number and the examiner cannot match it to an application filed under the second. Use the username and password recovery on the IACRA login page, or call the FAA help desk listed there with your original FTN and they will restore access to the same account.