On Sunday, 7 March 2021 at 12:06:18 UTC+2, wrote:
Good morning,

My name is Douglas and I am a glider pilot here in the UK.

I would like to start a friendly discussion about the decline of gliding and whether this is an issue outside of the UK.

Within the UK gliding has been in decline for decades and according to discussion on gliderpilot.net this is down to a few key issues, which I may go into later in the thread if required.

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts on this.

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Douglas

Gliding as a sport has been in steady decline since early 90's, your country's figures may vary a bit, but probably not much. There has been multitude of plausible explanations over decades, such as cost, time, lack of private planes, club planes, availability of airfields, airspace etc.

In my opinion it is just normal cycle of people thinking what they do with there spare time. Hobbies come and go. Flying is not as exciting or interesting as it used to be for "normal people". Did you know that amount of people that read books in their spare time is down by 30% in few decades? Reading, 30%!? Are books or stories too expensive, time consuming or what? No, people probably just want to lie on a sofa staring at their phones instead.

It's time to NOT feel this quilt anymore. Let's just move on, try to keep what we have and have fun flying. Yes we can promote our sport and make sure everyone can get into sport. But to cry ourselves to sleep every night because declining numbers, we have done enough of it.