"C Kingsbury" wrote:
"C Kingsbury" wrote:
Who would've guessed 20 years ago there would even be such a thing
as
the
"Discovery Wings Channel?"

...or that an aviation nut like me would almost never watch it?

Maybe if they did a bit more interesting programming rather than
recycling
"bizarre machines of Nazi Germany" hand-me-downs from the History
Channel...
I wonder how many hours of programming per month is new? I'd bet no
more
than 5-10.

"Learning to Fly" is a nice idea that would have benefited from (1)
following multiple students with different personalities and (2)
editing. Of
course that means jacking up production costs, which have to be
covered
somehow. Digital tech has brought post-production costs down
enormously but
it still costs real money to put a film crew on-site. This probably
explains
why there's still so little original content.

What Wings lacks is a signature show that people like us make a point
of
watching. They ought to do something like the back page of AOPA Pilot,
or
Lane What's-Her-Name's column in Flying, where they do a 50-minute
feature
on interesting people, places, and planes in aviation. It could appeal
to a
wide audience and thus also be run on Discovery, Nat'l Geo, or
whoever.

I also wonder whether anybody's ever tried to make a movie of Rinker
Buck's
book Flight of Passage. It'd be cake to turn into a screenplay and it
has
enough mischief to keep it contemporary (think about the kids getting
high
painting the plane with nitrate dope) but ultimately "heartwarming"
enough
to become "the feel-good hit of the season for the entire family."

It's frustrating: a network about airplanes that has very little
programming for pilots. It seems they must do very little demographic
research.
--
Dan
C172RG at BFM