Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Flying with Friends


Here's a mini-essay I posted as a comment to a post on the facebook:

A couple thoughts on this. Although TV and other "modern" conveniences have had an impact, I am convinced that humans are, and always have been, social creatures. Given the proper circumstances we crave company. We naturally form into groups, and families (of all sorts), and clubs.

One remarkable result of the online "social media" movement is how much it has resulted in people who interact online also searching for opportunities to gather face to face. See the plethora of meetups and tweetups and just plain getting together for a beer.

And pilots are no exception to this. We love getting together for pancakes, or fly-ins, or just to hangar-fly over a cup of coffee.

A couple Saturdays ago I spent the day at an event of a regional soaring club. This was not simply a flying club, but a club made up of other clubs. They had gathered way up north here in NH to spend a week flying together in some unique conditions.

What I saw in them is that the special circumstances of soaring (it's very hard to do alone) gave them the little push they needed to be a vibrant group of flying friends.

There's a lesson to be learned there. To expand and strengthen the nation's flying clubs we must not only emphasize the financial benefits, we must learn how to make them a better way for us to fly with friends. To learn together. To share our passion.

Because bowling with friends is way more fun than bowling alone.

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