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Can aviation still attract young enthusiasts?

Like most of us here (I suspect) aviation is in my blood, but compared to the past what is there to attract young kids now? Most modern airliners look superficially the same (long tube with an engine under each wing) with no distinctive shapes like Concorde or Comet. There are no more “big” records to be broken; the last was probably the Rutan Voyager flying non-stop around the world in 1986. There are no plans to return to the moon, let alone other planets, and NASA doesn’t even have the capacity to put a man into space on its own now. The RAF has just two real combat types; long gone are the Phantoms, Buccaneers, Jaguars, Harriers, Lightnings, Canberras, Hunters, Vulcans, etc I grew up with. Bombers no longer need to be ever-bigger and fighters no longer need to be ever-faster. New types seem to take an eternity from drawing board to service compared to the old days when every SBAC show had a string of exciting new types making their debut; now you are lucky to see a new variant, and the flying display is a shadow of what it was. Even the end of the cold war has meant we can no longer scare ourselves with speculation about what the “Reds” might be up to (remember all the speculation about “Fearless” which didn’t actually exist?) and lap up those fuzzy and clandestinely obtained photos of new types with bizarre ASCC reporting names; now MiG & Sukhoi are only too happy to tell us what they are doing. So (putting down the rose-tinted glasses) what is there to attract kids today, compared to past times?

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