A New Strategy for
Marketing General Aviation?
Kris Kolluri, New Jersey’s transportation commissioner, believes his state needs to save small airports. As an owner/operator of a New Jersey general aviation airport I totally agree. Our family participated in the airport preservation effort insuring that Alexandria Field remains a public-use facility. Small airports like ours have been growing pilots since wide-eyed little boys sat on the fence to watch yellow taildraggers take flight. The aviation industry has a major problem: people are not motivated to learn to fly. Between 1980 and 2007 the number of pilots in the US decreased by 236,722. There are currently fewer than 600,000 (590,349) licensed pilots. Without new, creative thinking this trend will continue and collaterally affect aviation product sales. I believe we need to focus on new pilot recruitment, and the preservation and growth of small airports. The sales of aircraft, fuel, oil, headsets, books, charts, radios, etc., will follow. As a flight school operator I have several suggestions for how to address this problem.
Let’s consider current efforts to develop pilots. Nationally, GA has pursued the obvious target – the wide-eyed little boy as he matures into a potential aircraft buyer. Efforts such as AOPA’s “Be A Pilot” and “Project Pilot” and the EAA’s “Young Eagles” programs, while valuable, have not yielded a rise in pilots’ numbers. To me GA’s marketing efforts have always been focused on aircraft sales. This lack of new pilots has resulted in the increasing average age of a pilot being now 45.7 years, up from 41.3 in 1993.
What about tapping the large market consisting of men and women from age 16 through the current pilot age group and up? The current strategy is directed at people who have always wanted to fly and focuses on a period in their lives when they have a lot of expendable money. General Aviation needs more than one marketing strategy. GA could benefit from marketing plans for those who always wanted to fly at any age, and one for those who never gave flying a second thought. Two such programs do exist. With comfortable entry points and separate learning objectives, we can reach those who “always wanted to fly” at a young age and those who made their way to become an adult “never giving flying a second thought.”
Aviation Camps: introduce children of non-flying or even fearful parents to the empowerment of flight. One hundred percent (100%) of our “Cleared for Takeoff” campers continue to take flight lessons. Many go on with their parents’ financial support to become private pilots. This program gets people into general aviation earlier, and for a longer period of time.
The Leaders Take Flight® is a two day leadership and personal empowerment workshop. My father taught me that our airport exists on growing pilots both experienced and new to flying. Research to develop this program appropriately began with a grant from the New Jersey Aviation Education Program. Both programs work and are available now. A healthy flight school needs young and old, male and female, blue collar and corporate executives. I became determined to find out why more women (more than half of US population) didn’t learn to fly, and how to shift negative thinking about flying to positive, or at least neutralize it. Our airport served as a lab; research subjects walked past me everyday. I started to stop them and ask questions. After two years I had conversations with over 200 women who either accompanied their significant other to the airport or dropped their sons off for a flying lesson. I also conducted over 100 interviews with licensed women pilots, and discovered that female pilots, for the most part, developed their interest in flying from a close connection with a male pilot in their lives. The sad truth is that the remaining women simply didn’t care about flying.
The second level of research was assisted by a grant from the Wolf Aviation Fund. It proved to be helpful in getting more women to experience the empowerment of the cockpit, shift negative thinking about flying to positive, and look at leadership development for men and women. The research results revealed that participants wondered what they had been afraid of. They reported that their perceptions of flying itself had improved and some even expressed an interest in flying. The striking significance here is that the participants came into the workshop to learn about something other than flying. If a new entry point for GA is established the potential market just for women in the same 45 to 49 age group is an additional 11M. A strong leadership program for both executive level men and women would increase the projected market penetration even higher.
Think about this – during the promotion of one of our research workshops, a flyer was used with an airplane on it. Hundreds of people saw the flyer. No one responded. When the airplane image was removed and replaced with copy about the workshop content - personal empowerment and self-discovery - the workshop was filled in two days. After the workshop, a participant said, “From my perceived risk yesterday to today I am shocked by how wrong I was that I just wouldn’t like flying.” Consumers are now very much in control of the future of flying. Mr. and Mrs. General Public are just not interested in, or they are deeply afraid of, flight. Education and one-on-one experience-sharing are required for the kind of attitude shifting.
The Leaders Take Flight® workshop deals with attitude shifting. The curriculum incorporates solid principles of learning and makes a difference in participants’ lives, whether they become enthusiastic pilots or more productive in their daily lives. We should develop a nation-wide marketing plan to fund delivery of the Leaders Take Flight® workshop and capture this untapped market. The first step would be to develop a funding resource from all available state aviation education programs, as well as companies selling collateral aviation products and services. Who better to support such an effort than those who would benefit from the success of the Leaders Take Flight® workshop? Changing negative public perception should be a goal of GA. In the process we will create magic.
There still is magic in flight. I believe our industry has been sustained for its first 100 years by the pioneering spirit of its inventors. The numbers speak for themselves – we need new tools to introduce people to flying. The Leaders Take Flight® workshop is a new educational tool – it is a pioneering effort – let’s figure out how to use it nationally.
For more information please contact: Linda F. Castner - Up, Up and Away, Inc.Email: upupaway@ptd.net - Office 908.735.0870 - www.alexandriafield.com or for workshop info: www.leaderstakeflight.com