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It's great that you are willing to address some of the cultural issues in the sport. As you noted, the culture in the sport may have a lot to do with its growth or death. But it may be much deeper than you've covered in your video.
For example, USHPA has been killing the sport of hang gliding through their support of paragliding over hang gliding at sites like Torrey Pines for decades. USHPA doesn't care whether they teach hang gliding or paragliding at Torrey as long as they generate new USHPA members and keep the temporary "joy ride" membership money flowing. So USHPA was happy to go along with whatever the business wanted. That included denying site insurance for the Torrey Hawks Club (a USHPA Chapter) and keeping the Torrey Hawks off the Torrey Pines Soaring Council. They certainly didn't want the Torrey Hawks offering free hang gliding flights at Torrey as we did at Dockweiler. For several years, various members of the U.S. Hawks (including myself) actually purchased a full day of open flight lessons at Dockweiler from Joe Greblo at Windsports so anyone could just walk up and get a free lesson and a free flight. Here's some documentation:
There was no snobbishness there. Everyone encouraged new pilots to give the sport a try. Many of us helped carry the gliders back up to relieve the stress on the Windsports instructors.
Did USHPA support us in any way? No. In fact, they eventually expelled me so I could no longer participate in the annual Otto meets at Dockweiler. It would have stayed that way without the help of Joe Faust and Frank Colver who both helped me get the site open for non-USHPA pilots on Mondays and Tuesdays.
This point is further reinforcement of Rick Masters' famous quote:
Rick Masters wrote:People talk about the sport of hang gliding dying. It's not dying. It's being murdered. By the U$hPA.
I really appreciate you covering so many aspects of the sport. But at some point, it might be good to cover a few of the less comfortable things that are really killing the sport of hang gliding. These include USHPA's insurance monopoly, USHPA's complete silence on the Recreational Land Use statutes, USHPA's selective Chapter renewal practices, and USHPA's policy of protecting unqualified and dangerous schools through expulsion or threatened expulsion against anyone testifying against them.
