Kyle Boatright wrote:
My last issue of Flying came in the mail today, and I won't be re-upping the
subscription. In recent years, I've grown more and more reluctant to renew
it, but when it came to crunch time, I went ahead and mailed in my $12.00 or
whatever. Not this year, though. In all honesty, I don't remember the last
article or column in Flying that made me want to go back and re-read the
article. Instead, the magazine arrives and I spend an hour or so breezing
through it, then it goes into the trash can, leaving me wondering what I
missed.

Once upon a time, I subscribed to 4 or 5 aviation magazines and enjoyed them
all. Now I'm only taking two aviation related mag's - Sport Aviation and
AOPA Pilot, and both of them are member benefits from their sponsor
organizations. I have a tremendous interest in aviation and love to read,
so why don't the aviation magazines interest me anymore? Have the
magazines changed? Is it me? Is it that the subject matter is finite and
after reading 20 years worth of aviation magazines, there is very little
left that is new and interesting to me?

Anyway, it is sad in a way that there isn't an aviation magazine that
interests me enough that I'll spend $12 or $15 a year for a subscription.

My interest in GA pretty much started when, several years ago, I read a
Flying Mag in a doctor's waiting room. It was about an inch thick and
had articles like the history of the China Clipper, one of the
classics IMO was "When Real Men Flew IFR" which was an old airline
writing about his experience flying DC-3's on four-course ranges and
cheating minimums to get into Idelwild because the competition got in
so damnit I'm getting in too, etc. I've subscribed ever since.

It has gone significantly downhill. It has much less content than just
a few years ago and too much of it is the same stuff written by the
same old blowhards. Just look at how thin it is now compared to only a
few years ago. Clearly the budget for editorial content has been cut
to the bone. Richard Collins is particularly hard for me to take.
Someone said his statistical stuff is good, yeah right. He's boring
and his writing is completely self-centered. He flies a C210, so he
does a scan of C210 accidents and gets an article out of it, then he
does one of C210 SDR's and gets another article out of it, etc. I
think he bangs some of those articles out in all-nighters at deadline.
Half the time I think he just pulls out his work from a few years ago
and puts a few touches on it. He's done that several times.

I still think it's worth it for Lane Wallace, Aftermath, and Les Abend.
Very occasionally they'll have an additional feature article that
interests me but more and more seldom. But hey it's only $12/year and
IMO the three I like are worth that.

I also get Aviation Consumer, which I usually find fascinating. I
recently let Aviation Safety lapse because I didn't think I was really
getting any new info from it. AOPA Pilot is the best of the glossies,
but that's kind of top.turd.dungpile at this point. I found Private
Pilot and Plane & Pilot to be atrocious, bad quality (not just poor
writing but also layout errors), very repetitive, and unrewarding to
read -- so many times an article looks like I would enjoy it because
it's about an airplane type or subject I'm interested in and I always
came away disappointed.

What's really depressing is if you can dig up old articles from Flying
or AOPA Pilot. I've run into a few on the web, they used to be so much
better.