Where are the "keeners"?.... those kids who will hang around the airport, and do anything to get into the air. I was one, and did very well by it. I have had my plane here at home for twenty years, and I have only had one kid have the initiative to come and ask to go flying.
I was an airport kid. I bicycled 15 miles to the airport every night after school let out as a kid, and scrubbed airplanes and begged rides. Anything to be around airplanes. If I couldn't wrangel a ride, I made do with sitting in them, washing them, waxing them, fueling them, working on them.
I think kids today are repulsed a lot by the cost; flying is out of reach of people these days. Kids have a lot of things competing for their attention. We didn't have computers. Kids today have unbelievable entertainment systems at their fingertips anywhere they go. As a kid I built gliders out of straws and paper and thread. Today kids plug in a game cartridge and shoot people on a computer screen. When I rode somewhere in a car as a kid, I'd take an E6B and practice with it doing distances as we drove, playing with wind triangles, and reading flying books. Kids these days drive somewhere with their eyes glued to a monitor screen, watching Shrek or The Karate Kid, or whatever is big right now. They hardly seem to look out the window.
It used to be that time spent aloft couldn't be deducted from one's lifespan; one couldn't get enough flying. Put kids on air airplane these days and it's "are we there yet?"
The most common sentiment I hear from kids these days? "I'm bored."
What ever happened to afternoons daydreaming about flying with birds?
Probably gone along with reading books. Then again, what ever happened to paper? I don't even get paper charts in the airplane, any more.
I miss paper. I miss the days when kids still wanted to fly.