Stuart & Kerri FERGUSON wrote:
Participating in gliding the way we do it is Australia needs many
resources including disposable income, personal ability, and most
of all time. I believe it is spare time, or the lack of it that
makes gliding hard to promote.
As a community, we make almost *zero* effort to locate people who enjoy
aviation enough to _want_ to spend time on it. When we inevitably
fail to find them, we rationalize our failure by saying that people
don't have spare time anymore.
... and yet surfers think nothing of spending the whole weekend at
the beach, or of driving 300km in a rattly 4WD to get to a beach
in the middle of nowhere which might, if the weather is right, have
the perfect break...
... and untold thousands spend their entire Saturday in winter with
the football club, or the entire Saturday in summer playing cricket,
with nights during the week for practice sessions...
Gliding's problems have very little to do with availability of spare
time, and lots to do with our total inability to select and recruit
those who *do* have the time, and who have a lust and joy for the
pastime. As another poster said last night, we need to convince folks
that they're better off spending their recreational resources with us
than with the cricket club.
GFA membership constitutes about 0.025% of the Australian population.
Perhaps we ought to be aiming for 0.1% -- A tenth of one percent is
about 20,000 people. Given the number of people who say, "Yes," when
asked whether they've ever wanted to fly, it ought to be EASY to find
that many people. So what are we doing wrong that makes us fail to
recruit them?
We have constraints which we have to work under: We aren't made of
money, so our clubhouses and accommodation *will* be sub-standard.
We need to be ready before convection starts, and there's a lot of
work to do each day anyway, so an early start *is* needed. We want
to be out of airspace problems, so distance *is* required. Those are
realities we just have to cope with.
But within those constraints, there's still a lot of room to move.
If we can make gliding *fun*, we'll get people who are prepared to
give it as much time as surfers, cricket players and football players.
Have a look around your pie cart this weekend. Are people laughing,
mucking around like larrikins, having a good time? If they are, that
vibe will rub-off on visitors, and they'll pick-up on the fun: Good
times are infectious. If they aren't... well, let's just say that that's
infectious too, and your visitors are likely to be walking away thinking
that maybe this whole gliding thing is a bit boring.
- mark
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I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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