Suggestion to make FSA more popular:
Cut back a lot on advertisements.
Cut back on wasted pages of colourful graphics. Children may love the pretty pictures but the mag is not for children
Get hold of overseas accident reports - there are many sources including NTSB, the British and Canadian equivalent. With careful editing to suit space requirements of FSA, publish those accident reports especially where loss of control crash - burn -die is involved. This includes airliners as well as GA types. Fortunately, in Australia major accidents are rare so FSA needs to look overseas for the serious accidents.
There is no shame in reproducing some of the UK incident/accident reports and in fact in the good old days of Mac Job's Aviation Safety Digest - and before his time the earlier DCA Accident digests, those magazines frequently used overseas accidents in their pages simply because there were so few in Australia.
It can be seen in earlier Pprune pages there has been more or less continuous negative attitudes to the present editorial policy that plagues FSA readers. To have flying schools spruiking their wares in almost every page of FSA plus so much station self promotion, means more copies of FSA reach the waste paper basket than ever happened to the 1950-1970 era of the old "Digest" crash comic.
In those days the term "Crash Comic" was an affectionate term and most pilots eagerly awaited their free copy in the post box. Many oldies - and I include myself - jealously hoarded each copy. I still drag mine out and enjoy a good read. The crashes haven't changed much and there are always the same causes and lessons to be learned. But the way the stories were presented then are quite different to now in FSA. Now it is just a cursory glance through FSA which takes maybe five minutes -rather like reading the local suburban newspaper full of ads and shoved free into your letter box.
No doubt the editorial staff of FSA are greatly constrained by their bean-counters. Cost recovery has a lot to answer for. But in my book, the money spent by the tax payer for those annual travelling Flight Safety Forums around Australia, would be better spent on a completely revamped Flight Safety Australia magazine minus those bloody flying school ads. Right now you can't call FSA a crash comic anymore. More like an Ikea advertising magazine