"Jay Honeck" wrote in message news:eqVtc.16324$n_6.1632@attbi_s53...

snip!

G.A. will not survive without young people getting involved. All you have
to do is look at the pictures from Pinckneyville (and Oshkosh, and Sun N
Fun) to see a whole lot of gray (and, ahem, balding) heads in the photos.
Where are the young folks?

Spread the Word -- flying is cheap! :-)

Hi Jay,

You make some good points. I'm a younger guy (27) that is currently
renting, but am looking forward to buying a nice tri-pacer or cherokee
within the next couple of years. The Cessna trainers are just too
expensive! I also really enjoy working on my car and motorcycle,
particularly since I know it'll get done correctly. I'd imagine A&Ps
are a bit more thorough than the average motorcycle mechanic (God I
sure hope so), but I'd definitely like to find an A&P that would sign
off on my work if I owned a plane.

I guess I'm not really aware of the aging general aviation population.
I wanted to start flying at a much younger age, and even took a couple
of intro flights when I was around 20 and bummed right seat time
whenever I could. But I was also putting myself through college, so
money was very tight. The initial high costs of flight training put
it out of reach. I bought a new car AND motorcycle after graduating,
so I had to wait a couple more years before starting training for my
PPL.

I've noticed that a lot of my friends followed a similar path, so
perhaps a lot of "younger" people cannot really get into flying until
they're in their upper 20s (as long as they stay single!). At my
flight school in FL, there seems to be quite a few people (CFIs and
students) that are in their 20s and 30s, so maybe it's not as bad as
you say. I've even seen a couple of lucky high school age kids
getting lessons there. When I was living in Colorado, I also knew of
quite a few younger pilots.

Here's the question though... How many of these younger pilots will
remain in aviation? Unfortunately I have also met several people that
did a few lessons, or even obtained their PPL, but no longer fly for
whatever reason. Motorcycling (my other passion) has a very similar
situation. Many times young people will get involved w/ the sport
until they have a close call, or they get older and dwell on what
could happen, their wife doesn't like it, etc. and quit. The amount
of training between the two is (for the most part) pretty different,
but could the attrition rate be due to similar reasons?

I know of at least a couple former pilots that will tell me their
antics about scraping tree limbs on final into a dark airport,
encountering IMC, or whatever. And then they're like "yeah, I had my
fun but quit because it was dangerous". Same w/ bikes. I'll hear
their stories about how they were doing something incredibly stupid
and somehow made it out alive, only to sell their bike and tell every
guy they see on a motorcycle about how fun it was but then xxx
happened and I decided to hang it up. Maybe some people just aren't
cut out for these things, I don't know...

Sam