On May 7, 7:55*am, ray conlon wrote:
On May 7, 7:52*am, Jim Beckman wrote:

Here's something the Hawk Valley club did in New Jersey a couple of years
ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21PAYdokVxY

This was at a grade school, where the principal was a glider student at
our field. *He and a few others did a *lot* of preparation work, and the
kids got about a half day of exposure to basic flight physics, history of
flight, building balsa model gliders, and finally getting an up close
encounter with our club 1-26. *I don't know if we made any lasting
impressions, but we gave it a good effort. *And it was fun for us, too.

Jim Beckman

Bottom line, soaring is an expensive hobby, attracting people is not
ever going to be easy, they don't have the disposable income to enter
the sport. 150,000 machines are not in most peoples budget.
*It is a "one person" activity, wives, girlfriends,kids are left out
of the picture. It is not a family friendly activity.
*Unless something can be done to get the cost of gliders,
equipment,tows,instruction etc.on the order of being able to play
golf,riding motorcycles,,jet skis etc. it will never grow. With the
reality of the US economic picture at present, it will continue to
soaring will continue to shrink.
Maybe a "national club" deal where people could go from one glider
port/club to another and rent a bird and get tows for say 125.00$ per
day as a package, might help.

Splitting glider ownership 3-4 ways works very well to ease the burden
of ownership. Been there, done that, both in Europe and the US. In
my opinion, that should be the rule, rather than the exception.

Frank Whiteley