On Wednesday, August 20, 2014 9:09:31 PM UTC-6, Craig R. wrote:
There has been a lot of good dialog on developing cross country pilots (= private ship owners) with perhaps a small percentage of those becoming competition pilots.

However, when I look at the basics, the outlook is pretty dismal. To me, the bottom line is lack of personal income for the bulk of Americans.

It was stated earlier "Money is not the issue. People have plenty of cash to spend on recreation and discretionary activities".

The facts are quite the opposite. "Americans tend to think of their middle class as being the richest in the world, but it turns out, in terms of wealth, they rank fairly low among major industrialized countries," said Edward Wolff, a New York University economics professor who studies net worth."

Median net worth for middle class Americans is approximately $45,000. We rank 19th in the world. If you look at all Americans, the number is $301,000 (4th). This number is highly skewed because of the very to ultra rich (Bill Gates types). Disposable income is dandy for the rich, but not so wonderful for the middle class and below.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/11/news...wealth/?iid=EL

In addition, soaring in the US is not directly funded by our government. As many know, some European countries have varying degrees of government support to reduce their pilot's cost.

So if we can agree that most middle (and poorer) class Americans won't / can't spend the money necessary to join the ranks of cross country / racing glider pilots (this is an expensive sport!), we are left with the potential pilot pool of wealthy Americans. That is a much smaller number to work with.

So who are we marketing our sport to? The posts above seem to target middle class (and above) younger adults. With financial and time limitations most young adults deal with, these factors = small numbers. And as we have seen, many new pilots toss in the towel pretty quickly to pursue other activities.

So what do we do to expand our pilot pool? John Cochrane's point of limiting the turnover of current pilots seems to me to be the best method to increase the number of glider pilots. We keep working the front end as best we can and pull out all the stops to reduce the shrink. Slow growth is not sexy, but workable.




If the proposal is to enlist 20% of the population, then class economics is an issue but we are at most .006% of the population. That's way too tiny a number to be talking about the general economy. If we suddenly got .0003% of the population interested in learning to fly gliders, it would overwhelm our training capacity but it would turn the growth picture around.

Remember, soaring began in the US during the Great Depression. All we need is a few thousand new people - and they are out there waiting to be found. I think the problem is entirely our own pessimism.