On Nov 23, 2:37*pm, "Matt Herron Jr." wrote:
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

Matt, I agree 1300 - 2000 new pilots a year would be a huge success.
A few years from now, I'd like to see that expanded well beyond 2000 a
year. But, those numbers put some scale to the "promotion of soaring"
discussion. It also says that if we want that growth rate, we have to
start thinking about how to deal with it.

If our target is 2000 per year, and I believe that's reasonable, then
mass media isn't the right first line approach. Although, I'll take
all the successes like Tom Knauff's Good Morning America segment we
can get. I think "viral marketing" and social media represent a
better approach.

I hope we can get more grass roots effort. Just tell people about
what we do and send them to web sites with great images and videos.
If they have the "soaring gene" they will become glider pilots no
matter what else happens.