Bad publicity

Chris OCallaghan writes
We have an unrealistic view of our sport because we have so much
invested in its returns. We find the formula agreeable. Most people do
not.

Perhaps. Or is it that from the outside our small community seems so
exclusive and inaccessible to somebody with no prior aviation background
or connections?

As a complete outsider that had finally decided to take the plunge, just
walking onto an airfield involved a considerable degree of uncertainty
and required a tremendous amount of resolve to follow through. It's an
utterly alien environment to somebody whose only other aviation exposure
has been as an occasional punter on a commercial airliner.

Had my wife not been fool enough to have brought a trial lesson voucher
as a Christmas present, odds are I'd have never have done it for myself.
If nothing else, what I *perceived* as being the costs involved with
gliding were utterly prohibitive in my mind. But completely out of scale
with what I've actually found now that I've done it. I should have done
this 15 years ago. I wanted to, and now find that I could have done,
easily... Not that I'm bitter, mind you. I'm more than enjoying myself
making up for lost time.

So I'd argue that the publicity issues we have with our "sport" are
rooted in the *apparent* inaccessibility of what we do. It's very easy
to take for granted something you do every weekend. The thought that I
could wake up on a Saturday morning and by lunchtime find myself
wire-launched to 1700' was staggering to me when I first joined my club.
It is still.

And friends and family go one of two ways when I incessantly rail on
about my day at the airfield. Some of them switch off. Glaze-eyed
incomprehension. It just doesn't catch them. But some don't. They're
utterly fascinated. And intrigued that there is so much to it, and that
it is so, well, possible.

And if you think it is important to be featured on the news in a
positive light, all it takes is money to feed a PR machine. I'm sure
Steve Fosset can recommend a capable firm. Make sure you have 7 figures
available. Free advertising is expensive.

Absolutely. And certainly on a national scale.

On the other hand, awareness begins locally. And for something like
gliding, I'd be tempted to argue that the biggest payback is from local
and regional publicity, because that's where your new members come from.
And most local rags will happily print something of local interest if
its given to them as a done deal. But how many times has your club been
mentioned in the local paper in the last year?

Having said that, the above isn't necessarily intended as criticism,
merely observation. My point of view is as somebody very new to this
whole thing, it only being a little over six months since I first set
foot in a glider, and less than four since I seriously started to fly.

So my view is very, very ab inito and thus quite possibly ill-informed.

It also strikes me that the odds are that this matter has already been
discussed countless times, and were the matter as simple to address as I
might appear to be suggesting, it would, as an issue, have already been
done and dusted

But then apathy in such things rules supreme. Which is something
certainly not peculiar to the gliding world.


-Bill