Why this survey is worth more than the usual argument
The conversation about the sport ageing is normally conducted with anecdotes. Somebody looks around the launch point on a Saturday, counts grey hair, and posts about it. The reply is that their club is unusual. Neither side has anything to hand.
In September 2024 the SSA published Membership Discovery and Website Recommendations, a survey of its own membership run by an outside firm alongside a set of structured discovery groups. The mechanics matter, so here they are: the survey went to the active membership that had an email address on file — 7,810 members, of whom 7,371 were successfully contacted — and returned 1,636 responses, a 22% response rate. The report puts its own margin of error at about ±2.15% at 95% confidence.
A 22% response rate on an emailed survey is genuinely good; the report notes that membership surveys typically land between 10% and 30%. This is the sport's own body, asking its own members, publishing the result in full. It is the best evidence available on the question, and it is free.
One thing about the sampling frame is worth holding onto, because it points the opposite way to what you would guess. The survey could only reach members with a deliverable email address. If anything, that filter drops older and less digitally-connected members — so the age picture below is more likely to be flattering than alarmist.
The number everybody half-knows
The largest single age group among respondents is 65–74, at 35%. The 55–64 band and the 75-and-over band each account for another 21%. Add those three together and 77% of respondents are 55 or older. More than one in five is over 75.
At the other end, the 18–24 band is 1%. Not 1% of the general public who have heard of gliding — 1% of the people who have paid to join the national body.
Alongside that, 51% of respondents are retired, 32% work full time, and 10% own a business. That is a membership with weekday availability, which is a real asset for a club that needs midweek instructors and a real problem for one whose operation is built entirely around Saturdays.
A club planning ten years out is planning for a membership where three quarters of the people currently paying dues will be over sixty-five.
The part that is not decline
Here is where the received story starts to come apart. Asked how long they had been members, respondents answered:
| Time as a member | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Less than 1 year | 8% |
| 1 to 5 years | 22% |
| 6 to 10 years | 13% |
| 11 to 15 years | 10% |
| 16 to 20 years | 8% |
| 21 years or more | 39% |
Thirty per cent of respondents joined within the last five years. That is not the profile of a sport nobody is finding. People are still walking in, paying, and staying long enough to answer a survey. Whatever is wrong, it is not that the front door has stopped working.
Where it actually leaks
Look at the middle of that table instead. Six to twenty years — three bands covering fifteen years of a flying life — is 31% between them. Five years of recent arrivals nearly matches fifteen years of the bands behind them.
Read that carefully, because it is easy to over-claim. This is a snapshot of who is present, not a cohort tracked over time, so you cannot read a survival curve straight off it. Membership has also grown and shrunk over the decades, which moves the shape on its own.
But the direction is hard to argue with, and it matches what every club sees: the sport recruits reasonably and loses people in the years after the novelty and before the habit. Which is precisely the population our guide on why students quit is about — and it means the highest-value thing a club can do is usually not another open day.
Money, and the tension sitting inside the data
Two findings in this report point in opposite directions, and putting them side by side is the most useful thing on this page.
First: this is not a poor membership. Nearly half of respondents (47%) report household income between $100,000 and $349,999, with a further 21% declining to say. Seventy per cent hold a bachelor's degree or higher.
Second: asked an open-ended question about how the SSA could best serve members — no prompt, no list to pick from — 29% raised financial assistance and scholarships. It was one of the largest themes in the whole survey. Asked separately what would help students specifically, 16% raised it again.
Those are not contradictory once you notice they are about different people. The members answering are, on average, comfortable. What they are telling their own association is that the people who are not in the room cannot afford to be. Cost is not being reported as a personal complaint. It is being reported as a recruitment diagnosis, by the exact demographic that could pay.
The club-level numbers, which are the ones you can move
Most of this survey is about a national body. Three findings are about your club:
- 63% say they actively participate in their club — and 18% actively disagree that they do.
- 50% agree they get everything they need through their club. Thirty per cent sit in the middle, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.
- 57% feel well informed about upcoming events.
Nearly a fifth of respondents are paying and not participating. They have not quit — they are pre-quit, and they are the cheapest members you will ever retain, because they have already decided they want to be there.
Four things a single club can actually change
This page is not worth publishing if it ends in a shrug. Each of these is a lever that sits inside one committee's authority, and each has a number attached somewhere else on this site.
- The first-year cost, stated honestly and in advance
- Not the launch fee — the whole number, dues and launches and instruction together, which is what a prospective member is actually deciding about. Our cost-to-solo calculator builds it from real published club rates.
- The scholarship deadlines nobody tells juniors about
- There is real money available and it is scattered across a dozen organisations with different age bands and deadlines. If 29% of your national body's members think this matters, telling one 19-year-old about a 31 March deadline is a concrete act. We keep a dated index of the funds.
- The trial-flight conversion path
- Most clubs measure trial flights sold. Very few measure trial flights converted, and the gap between those two numbers is where the recruitment argument actually lives. See turning trial flights into members.
- The fee structure, which is quietly choosing your membership
- High dues with low flying rates keep the regulars and price out the occasional member; low dues with high rates do the reverse. Most clubs inherited theirs. See how clubs price membership.
What this survey cannot tell you
It cannot see anybody who left. This is the limitation that matters most, and it applies to every membership survey ever run. Everyone who answered is someone who stayed. The people whose reasons you most want — the ones who did two seasons and drifted — are structurally invisible here, and no amount of statistical care recovers them. If you want that data, your club has to collect it itself, from your own leavers, while they still remember why.
It cannot see anybody who never joined. The cost finding above is members' opinion about non-members, which is informed but is not the same thing as asking them.
It is one country, at one moment. This is the SSA, in 2024. The report itself describes an organisation serving around 9,000 members. Do not quietly promote it into a claim about world soaring, and do not present it in 2031 as current: cite it by name and year, which is why this page does.
And response bias is real, which the report says itself. People who answer surveys from their association are, almost by definition, more engaged than those who do not. The 63% participation figure is therefore probably the optimistic end.
The honest summary
The sport is older than its own members like to say, and the young-pilot number is worse than most clubs would guess. The recruitment picture is better than the mood suggests. The gap between those two is retention in the middle years, and that is a club-level problem with club-level fixes — not a national one to be waited out.
If your committee reads one number off this page, make it the last row of that table. Thirty-nine per cent of respondents have been there twenty-one years or more. They are the people who currently instruct, tow, run the winch, keep the books and sign the cheques. The question is not whether they will be replaced by a marketing campaign. It is whether the members who joined in the last five years are still there in ten.
Source: Soaring Society of America, Membership Discovery and Website Recommendations, September 2024. Figures quoted are from the published report; the number answering each question varies and is stated there.