Originally Posted by
Tarq57
Why do you think it is that so few of the kids seem interested?
It's probably rural life (while Lipetsk and Voronezh are industrial cities, the region in general is agricultural and not exactly the wealthiest, if not the poorest) and overall lack of interest in anything non-income-bringing among modern Russian kids. They want popular YouTube bloggers, easy money and career rather than a commitment that requires health, wit and (in the future) expense. Also, flight as a sport is perceived as something totally impractical: it's not soccer, athletics or swimming where you run or otherwise exhaust yourself physically, it's not boxing, wrestling or martial arts (either Asian or SAMBO) that supposedly keeps you fit and gives, in public opinion, a skill of kicking offending butts, it's not chess where you can, in theory, earn something if you're committed like Sergey Karyakin. Russia is rich country with a lot of poor people, and when your life is more about survival (by the way, the case of Flight TV and my own, so please pay attention to my closing remarks in the end of videos...), you don't think that it would be good to become a glider or a piston-engine plane pilot.
Moreover, “thanks” to how aviation, especially general aviation, is usually presented on broadcast Russian TV (either as extremely dangerous and illegal activity or a millionaire recreation, although there are some exceptions), people mostly don't associate themselves with piloting anything on their own. They just afraid of flight (otherwise I can't explain why people spend more than an airfare and a week, or even more, to get from, say, Khabarovsk to the Black Sea coast by train or car, while they can get there or elsewhere with one stopover in about 12 hours). There are regions in Russia where people are more used to aviation than to railway, for the lack of the latter (Yakutia, Chukotka), but that doesn't mean they want their own aircraft, or at least to be pilots themselves. There are cases in Siberia and Yakutia when people buy GA plane or helicopter and even hire a pilot just to move around, out of sheer necessity. Usually they do some kind of business, and had there been decent automobile roads they wouldn't even think of flight. Add generally discriminating and choking authorities attitude... As well, current generation of teenager's parents (more or less my generation and older, people of 35 to 50... I'm 2 months short of 36, if anything) are often
overprotective and want nothing than quiet life, so some of them, probably, explicitly prohibited their kids to associate with “some weird things that can fall from the sky with you,
useless irresponsible fool, inside”. What a logic (see italic font and draw conclusions).
Also, it's a stereotypical thinking: “anything that flies must have an engine, or it's just dangerous extreme sports for mentals, like hang gliders or parachute jumping”. About one in three random people have no idea of gliders, and the second most asked question is “do these small planes with propellers even still exist?" (of course, it's asked by people who don't have a GA airfield near their town or village. No ideas of air streams, thermals, airfoils and other flight basics. A lot of long-distance passengers (not only in Russia, I suppose) have totally no clue about why and how any aircraft flies, they don't like flight and think of an airplane as of just another kind of a bus... Essentially, flying economy on cheaper rates leaves more or less similar feelings even in me... romance lost shortly after they decided to named a plane Air-Bus
. Jetway here, jetway there, thick and even clouds below en route, not even a decent turbulence, and lack of legroom even for my humble 5'9"/175 cm height.