Ian Johnston writes
I think there is another fundamental problem he learning to glide
(in the UK, anyway) just isn't much fun. Typically it involves
standing round an airfield all day, hoping that an instructor whom
you've never met before will deign to give you a couple of circuits
and filling in the rest of your time acting as ground crew for the
private owners who seem incapable of driving tractors or hooking up
cables.

In part, perhaps I can see why you might say that (here in the UK,
anyway). But speaking from personal experience, learning to glide has so
far cost me a day per weekend (or half a day when other commitments have
encroached) since last October, and when I do go solo (odds are that
might be sometime in the next month or so at my current rate of
progress) the sum total financial cost will have been £470, to the penny
as long as you exclude the additional cash I've also spent on various
gliding books to tide me over on rainy days.

Compare that to the $7000 financial cost and clear personal trauma
Lennie the Lurker has apparently suffered over on the other side of the
Atlantic in trying to achieve the same, along with the terribly bitter
state that the experience has obviously left him in, and I'd have to say
that we have a terrific deal here in the UK and so must be doing
something right.

As for whether it's fun as well as economical... I suppose I've spent a
good part of this last British winter crawling out of bed at the crack
of dawn when my natural habit would otherwise be to continue sleeping
off the previous night's excesses, and then shivering on a cold, damp
and utterly unsheltered airfield whilst intermittently manning the
lights, retrieving the cables and manhandling the club's K13's whilst
waiting for my chance to fly in one.

On the other hand, that time has been in the warm company of a small
number of similar enthusiasts and other stalwarts still gripped enough
by this flying thing to want to do the same in preference to spending
the winter warm and snug at home. Not to mention the instructors that
have turned up week after week to give their time freely in order to
teach us how to do this flying thing safely... And their enthusiasm is,
absolutely without exception, utterly infectious.

For the first couple of months that did mean that each week was
inevitably with an instructor I'd never met before and the flying
through the winter, of course, did consist mainly of launch, circuit,
land. On the other hand, the typical day gave me up to six launches to
1600' plus (if I could give the whole day to the thing - otherwise it
would be half a day and three launches) so the value was somewhat more
than "a couple of circuits" :P

And after the first couple of months I'd worked my way through most of
the instructors on the rota, so they ceased being strangers quickly
enough. As for the others at the launch point, across the winter they
tend to be a smallish, select group, the same faces week on week more or
less, and so they ceased to be strangers by week two or three.

Worst of all, that's how many of the old farts / committee members /
instructors want it to be, because that's how it was in their day.
Well, maybe it was, but suffering doesn't broaden the soul
particularly and there are many, many other hobbies which don't
involve a year or two of being bored and patronized in the learning.

Gliding clubs in the UK have absolutely no problem in attracting new
people into the sport. They are absolutely lousy at retaining them.

I can honestly say in the last six months I really haven't spent much
time bored. Just being around aircraft has been enough of a novelty for
me to prevent that, and it isn't as if there isn't plenty to do whilst
not flying. I've been antagonised a couple of times, and patronised
maybe twice. But in the broad spectrum of the last six months' worth of
experience, these occasions have been real exceptions. And in any broad
enough group of people you will always get these exceptions. In my
experience it doesn't matter whether you're talking about gliding,
fishing, or amateur dramatics. It's the cost of interacting with people.
But at 5'8 and 140lbs (including parachute), I'm big enough and ugly
enough to deal with such provocation on my own terms :P

I'd say that soaring is, like many things, something you are either
going to take to or you won't. On the other hand, it is the sort of
experience that many will want to try, if given the chance. And of them,
some, albeit a small minority, will bite.

In this, the cheap trial lesson is your friend. In today's terms, £25 is
the sort of change I have in my back pocket that I might spend down the
pub on a Saturday night without thinking about it. Giving me three
flights instead of one for £50 might seem like a good deal, but that
brings it to the sort of expenditure level that I have to clear through
my wife

Aside from that, you have to make the opportunity known, and your
obvious target audience is your local community. To put that into
context, I live within about 10 miles of two gliding clubs. But it's
taken me 15 years to realise just how accessible gliding really is, and
in the end this epiphany of realisation came in the form of a £70 trial
lesson voucher brought in the basement of Debenhams as a Chrismas
present from my wife that had me travelling to Wales to redeem
(Talgarth, to be precise - a lovely place that I sincerely plan to
re-visit one of these days).

It strikes me therefore as unsurprising that this journey has taken 15
years, and I figure it was only luck that meant it didn't take another
15.

So I'd say that if you're really concerned with declining numbers, make
cheap "trial lessons" easily available, convenient and accessible, and
when the punters turn up at the airfield, make sure they're looked after
and made to feel welcome and involved for the **duration of the time**
they are actually at the field, and not just whilst they're under the
care of their actual instructor, strapped into the front seat of a
glider.

Anyway, I appreciate that much of what I have to say on this matter
could be both construed as the naive opinion of a newbie and deemed
terribly parochial, in that it relates to my own experiences so far in
the UK which I understand to be very different from somebody learning to
glide elsewhere in the world, stateside especially.

On the other hand, the subject is in part about attracting newcomers to
soaring, of which I am quite recently one myself. And maybe my own
experiences in this (which are, by and by, entirely positive now that
I'm actually here) might make an interesting point of comparison to any
other points of view or experiences found here.



--
Bill Gribble

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