On Thursday, March 27, 2014 6:51:58 PM UTC-6, wrote:
Our experience in central Indiana is similar to Herb's.



Following a 3 day exhibit at an event at the AMA headquarters a couple of years ago, we ended up with 4 people coming to Alexandria to fly a glider.



A FAST flight was given away in a drawing and the winner did not come to the airport for his free flight.



In reverse, it seems that many full scale glider pilots break out their RC models after a day of flying or on no fly days at contests.



What can be done to get the RC folks coming to the gliderports?



We have had similar experiences with full scale airplane pilots at airshows. There seems to be a lot of interest in the glider on display, but little or no traffic is generated to the gliderport for a follow up flight.

Welcome to the consumer century. Many of the people I talk to about soaring say in one way or another, "I can't learn do that." Since there's money to be made convincing people they can't do anything on their own, "doing something" has come to mean writing a check to pay someone else to do it. Consequently, many people regard taking the controls of an aircraft and flying it themselves akin to DIY brain surgery. "Flying" has come to mean buying a ticket.

But, don't give up. There's probably only about .1% -.01% of the population with the "glider gene" so, on average, one would have to talk to 10,000 people to find one. On the bright side, that means there's 30,000 - 300,000 people out there who don't yet know they have it.