We deserve it
GA is definitely not elitist.
But we could be accused of being insular, and we often deserve the poor press we get.
GA is a world you know nothing about unless you make a positive decision to enter it, for some via a test-flight birthday present (which is how I got into it). Before I had the test-flight, I had just assumed that GA was beyond my reach. The only way GA seemed part of the community was via noise complaints.
Most airfields, most clubs and most pilots do very little to communicate what we do, how we do it and why we do it with the rest of the world. We seem to act like a bunch of beleagured individuals, victims of the CAA, JAR, landing fees, new regulations, noise abatement, fuel costs, rotors, fixed wing ......and so on.
Wouldn't it be great if we could spend a little of our efforts reducing the plethora of organisations in GA UK to one, and focusing on letting other people know how fantastic GA is, what it does for us, what they're missing and most important of all, how GA helps local communities and the fact that they can do it too?
We need to make GA much more accessible to Jo public.