There's no shortage. We have a temporary artificial demand following an unprecedented spin-down with Covid; we're working through a rebound effect. The myth of a pilot shortage had been bantied around for decades, and has always been a lie used to sell flight training and magazines.

We don't have a shortage of applicants or of upstarts and fledgling flyers. We have movement, a bubble in a cyclical industry. It's a wheel, and comes and goes. This bubble, too.

As for promoting aviation; I got my first airplane ride as a scout, doing an aviation merit badge. Those who finished, got a ride. It's a favor I've returned many times over the years. I can't say how many, if any of those I've given rides to or talked to have gone on to make a career, but I'm sure the guy who taught our merit badge class is probably long done with his career by now, and has no idea how many of us might have gone on to become pilots. Just part of the circle. I've yet to see a young eagles event come up short of kids wanting airplane rides, and Oshkosh is no ghost town. It's packed. Same for Sun n' Fun, and every airshow I've been to or attend. The last one was packed, at a relatively small town, and the kids were lined up by the fence to get pictures and autographs of the performers.

The kids who do start today will have a long time before retirement, and whatever it is in forty or fifty years, we can reasonably expect it to be quite different from what we know now. So much so that any temporary ripple today town't even be a memorable after-thought, down the line, and minor changes such as moving the retirement age to 67 will have no impact whatsoever on the decision of youth to seek a flying career. None.

I live in a pragmatic world, though once I was a romantic in a world of wood and wire and fabric wings. I do enjoy seeing the sparkle in the eyes of those who still see it that way, and there is plenty of that sparkle left to go around.