snip...
If we 'got lucky' with something like the Disney TV shows of the
1960's and .01% of the 300 million US population sought flight
instruction in gliders, 30,000 people would descend on our training
operations. *I expect 29,000 of them would be very unhappy with us.
Before we start "pushing" a mass market response into our 'pipeline',
we'd better clean the pipes.

The quickest, easiest and cheapest way to get 1300 new student starts
per year is for each of the roughly 15,000 US glider pilots to just
talk to a few people about soaring.

Bill Daniels
Chairman, SSA Growth and Development Committee

I agree with most of what you are saying Bill, but I don't understand
why we need to increase our training capacity beyond 2000 pilots/
year. That would be an increase in total soaring pilots of over 13%
per year! (less attrition, of course) I would call that an astounding
success. As rusty as the pipeline may be, I would contend that lack
of capacity is not our biggest problem.

Matt