- Sat Jan 11, 2014 3:56 am
#343128
Well, puting up that reply was a project on it's own. My last reply, the long one is the one you should be reading. Sorry for the mess.
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combat.is.hell wrote:Well, puting up that reply was a project on it's own. My last reply, the long one is the one you should be reading. Sorry for the mess.
filthy wrote:There are many hurdles to getting someone into this sport. $, time, location, patience, dedication, instruction etc. All are mentioned above. Still people will Hang glide, right.Advertising for a unique "product" has very limited results. How many normal people out there are unware of airsports? Not many.
It appears to me we need to do a better job of selling this 'product' ie, sport.
Advertising is the best way to sell something! Along with backing it up with internet, grass roots marketing, etc.
combat.is.hell wrote:
It is an intresting topic and I have had many discussions with fellow pilots about the ever decreasing numbers of new people in the sport.
It is definatelly a good idea to send people for a tandem flight, even for a 1 or 2 day trial course. Just make sure you send them to a proffessional instructor that makes a living out of it. Even if only one of 30 or 40 decide to get into the sport, you are at least providing an income for a valuable resource in our sport (the instructor that is).
If, on the other hand, the instructor is not a proffessional and is not making any real money out of it (me for example) then it might be better to let the curious find out themselves what kind of a sport this is, the level of commitment it requires, the time it takes to start flying "like those cool guys up there" and let them come in contact with the poor soul that is the instructor themselves. Although I am a new instructor, I am already tired of people taking up my limited instruction time only to discover in grave dissapointment that after one week on the training hill they are still not allowed to fly cloudbase on a badass topless.
I live in Sweden where all the instructors are taking time out of their proffessional and family lives to go out and teach. None of us makes any real profit out of instructing, we are happy if we break even. The students we want to have are the ones that will continue flying. If this means just a couple of students then that is just perfect. Why have ten students take up your time only to be left with one or two by the end of the season? It is a waste of my precious time as far as am concerned. It is a waste of the commited students time also.
Promotion? There are hundreds of films on the net - just from Sweden, not talking about the thousands upon thousands from other countries. We take part in fly-ins. We fly mosquito along crowded beaches. We have been featured on TV and newspapers.
Reach us? Anybody within a 10 km range of a working computer can easily find our national association website with listing of all local clubs and their websites, our videos and our contact details. Full details of all available courses in the whole coutry are also available on the association homepage. Does that wealth of information lead to more interest? No, it just means that we don't get contacted with questions about the sport very often - almost everything in answered on the website.
This year we have a particularly discouraging FAQ describing the sport as it is: expensive, time consuming, hard to get into, does not combined nicely with other expensive & time consuming hobbies. In that way we hope to reduce even more the amount of students who enroll for training only to leave after the end of the basic training.
I don't think that young people today are couch potatoes whereas young people thirty years ago were tough and commited and more willing to jump off mountains. In my opinion the good times that our sport experienced back then were a bubble.
Paragliding has also had it's days of glory and is now seeing the number of active pilots dwindle - the paragliding bubble is leaking air. Paragliding is easier, more accessible and more practical than HG but people in the sport stop flying and complain about lack of free time, expenses, distance to flying sites etc etc. Sounds familiar?
I also don't think distance to flying sites is much of an issue. I have invested in a mosquito so that I can fly locally when time doesn't allow for longer drives to free flying sites. An easy solution for increasing your flying hours. You fly with the motor and keep yourself current, then when the opportunity arises you make that full-day trip and free-fly to your heart's content.
Finally I don't think money is much of an issue either. If somebody is complaining about the cost of HG then you can be sure that their money is needed somewhere else: their ill-afforded big house, their pimped car, their consumption of stuff/s***, their social lives, other expensive hobbies and so on. And it is probably a good sign that this person is going to quit HG pretty soon. From people with low income I have heard that as soon as they get some money they'll be getting into the sport but I have not really heard them complaining about the cost of HG.
I think we just have to accept the fact that most people are just not ready to put so much effort into a hard sport that requires a lot of commitment, a crazy desire to want to be a hangglider pilot (not just any pilot) and an appreciation of flying in this way, with no control sticks, no windshields and no mechanical landing gear. I reckon the amount of new people getting into & staying in the sport is not going to increase, despite the fact that training is better and safer, wings are easier to fly and information plentiful and readily available.
I am personally planning to make sure that I only come out and instruct those few students that I could not be discouraged in any possible way.
filthy wrote:Our sport doesn't look sexy, and it should.I cannot comprehend where a comment like this comes from. When in view, the general public always watches us. Always. That's a better attention response than you would get than having Miley Cyrus dry-hump a wrecking ball naked. What do you mean it doesn't look sexy?
stephmet wrote:syncnsarc,I know this is an older thread but I wanted to add something to it. I am 17 y.o., an H3, and I love this sport more than life itself. I know that on the whole my generation is not that impressive, most of my peers like to play video games and sit inside while I run around doing stupid things like falling off trees in the woods. This being said, I don't think it is a generational thing that makes us a less motivated group.
To answer your question regarding the lack of younger people (20s-40s); poor marketing aside - it has to do with time. Most of my peers are mired in jobs working in excess of 50 hours weekly. After work, those with spouses and/or children simply don't have the time to do much of anything. I was fortunate in that I had flight park 40 minutes from my home, my then girlfriend - now wife, knew that hang gliding came with the package. Not so for others. The work / life balance is a hard walk in the 21st century and most simply can't commit the time to learn, let alone fly regularly enough to maintain currency.
waltspoint wrote:>>I spent nearly 4 years on the training hill with literally hundreds of flights because nobody wanted to sign off on the kid going off the mountainBelieve me, I wanted to at many points.
You did it all wrong! The way us old-timers would have done it would have been to borrow Dad's truck without his knowledge some night when he leaves his glider on top, steal his beer, and do a moonlit flight off the mountain launch.
Anyways, good on you for your enthusiasm! Come on out and fly with my son sometime. He claims he's a H2, but is probably doing nighttime flightsof of Yosemite with my truck and gear without me knowing. Now, where's my beer, and why's my gas tank empty?!? /jd
Dave Jacob wrote:H3 at 17? That impresses the heck out of me Littlepilot. I have 3 teenage sons and I agree with you on just about everything. One downside to attracting younger pilots that I don't think you mentioned is the fact that our population has aged. When I picked up the sport, I was 19 and most of the guys were in their late 20's or early 30's. And while it seems funny now I felt out of place. I was barely out of highschool, living at home and working entry level while these guys had careers, wives, sometimes kids. Now they have grand kids. I think pilots like you are exactly what is needed to bring more young people into the sport. Seeing other people who share your station in life flying hang gliders makes it seem both more appealing and more accessible. I hope you are bombing the social media sites with pictures of yourself flying. I also hope you can interest lots of your friends. You guys really are our greatest asset.Thank you! I appreciate it. I most definitely am bombing the sites, at school I'm know as the kid who flies. I'm looking to go for my H4 this summer. I truly want to develop this sport into a much more popular one. I think it would be amazing to make it a televised sport, especially with today's live tracking technologies and graphic animations.
littlepilot wrote:I truly want to develop this sport into a much more popular one. I think it would be amazing to make it a televised sport, especially with today's live tracking technologies and graphic animations.You are going to be teaching at one of the few places where the sport is actually growing. Students who feel part of the community early on, are more likely to stay with it. Focus on the fun.
Also, I noticed before someone was talking about making the sport more "sexy." IMHO, these new topless gliders and high per harnesses are sleek and sexy as ever.
TomGalvin wrote:It's always fun Tom! I'm really excited, and I really pumped to teach!!littlepilot wrote:I truly want to develop this sport into a much more popular one. I think it would be amazing to make it a televised sport, especially with today's live tracking technologies and graphic animations.You are going to be teaching at one of the few places where the sport is actually growing. Students who feel part of the community early on, are more likely to stay with it. Focus on the fun.
Also, I noticed before someone was talking about making the sport more "sexy." IMHO, these new topless gliders and high per harnesses are sleek and sexy as ever.