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>Dick,
First, where is your Colorado airport? I live here, too--near Centennial, in Parker. I've flown into many front range and mountain fields.
I agree with your comments about constantly having to market general aviation--if you're in the business. There are many businessmen who would profit from learning to fly who haven't given it a thought. Think of the thousands of traveling salesmen or entrepreneurs out there. Also, hooking a recreational pilot provides a marketing niche. I like flying for utility, not for the love of it--and many people wouldn't intrinsically like flying, but would be attacted because of its utility. Take golfing for instance. You can pile your closest buddy and your clubs into your 172 or larger, fly an hour or two, golf at some remote, championship golf course, and be back before dinnertime. Heck, from Centennial in a T210, you can take a friend or two to the Aspen airport in 45 min., be at the gondola ten minutes later, ski all day, and be back to Denver in time to go out to eat. In the winter it takes six hours to drive to Aspen--one way. And sharing the cost of the rental or operating expenses is not that much! When people are presented with this type of utility, and then actually experience it for themselves, their lifestyles change and they then can't live without the airplane. In the Pacific Northwest, you can fly to any of a dozen islands in Puget Sound, near Vancouver and Seattle, in one day. To get to them by ferry, it would take a week of sitting on a boat or in heavy traffic to do that. One day, we flew in my Beech 58P from Seattle over Mt. Shuksan to Eastern Washington and ate lunch in Wenatchee, flew up the Eastern slope of the Cascades, over the North Cascades highway near Canada, over to San Juan island (across from Victoria, Canada), where we ate dinner of fresh waterfront seafood, and back over Sea-Tac to Auburn field. You don't need a 58P to do that, a 172 would do just fine. So, in this day and age, you would think people would start turning to general aviation just for the utility of it--to get more out of life. It's sure better than sitting in hours and hours of exhaust gases on the freeway.
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DJSchaut
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DJSchaut
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