Thoughts on mental calcification in the flying community

[Rich]

Be forewarned: This is something of a rant.

We did an EAA Young Eagles event yesterday here in Prineville. Parents/kids were, as always, great to work with. I only made two flights, but took two pairs of brothers together on those flights. This is sometimes done at the request of the kids and their guardians. These were all 10-11 year old kids and were in wonder at the whole experience and chatted throughout about relevant stuff.

Working with the support team, however, tried my patience throughout. All are 50+ years old, but younger than I. Yet it seems the parts of their brain responsible for learning anything new are past their expiration date. EAA now has an almost totally digital process for registration of pilots and kids and managing the checkin and pairing process on the day. It was the first time our chapter has used it. The entire thing seems totally obvious to me. EAA has webinars, instruction publications and whatnot to familiarize with the process. I won't go through the gory details, but instead of my usual role of just flying kids I had to constantly explain and re-explain this stuff to the same individuals. It didn't help that our coordinator (the only one who can perform certain tasks) screwed up repeatedly in managing his part of the process. You had to be there. The saving grace was when we had a younger woman (not from our chapter) show up and basically took over the on-day pilot/kid matchups, certificate printing and such. She hadn't done this before but picked up right away on performing all the tasks. Our "actual" registrar wound up sitting and observing and hopefully learning something for the next time. (It was a real eye roller observing the latter repeatedly trying to stuff a USB-A dongle into the laptop's HDMI port.)

The sad thing is that the challenges were completely predictable, knowing these folks as I do.