11 May 2020
On 21 March 1994 I signed the contract to buy FLYER magazine from my then employer Future Publishing. My boss, and Future’s owner at the time, Chris Anderson, had just gone to the US where he would later set up TED. Chris lent us his personal office, rent free, for a couple of months while we sorted out our own, and worked our way through the hundreds of small jobs that need doing when you start a business, all while publishing FLYER. There were just four of us at the time, and for the first couple of years it wasn’t unusual to work six days a week from 10am to very, very late. I am humbled that many of the readers and advertisers we had back then are still with us today, and quite a number of both have become good friends.
Before buying the magazine I’d finished my PPL with Archer Flight Training at Gloucester, where I had a share in a PA28, having sold my share in a Dart 17R sailplane, which I flew with Bath Wilts and North Dorset. Ironically, at least in the early days, owning FLYER magazine meant less, rather than more, flying.
“Over the past 26 years the central experience has been one of amazing aeroplanes, amazing flying, and above all amazing people”
A month or so after buying the magazine I found myself on the way to my first Sun ’n Fun to meet our US sales rep Paula Raeburn who introduced me to our US advertisers. The event was a lot bigger then and the experience was a bit overwhelming. FLYER contributor Geoffrey Boot showed me the Sun ’n Fun ropes, and I got to better know the inimitable Austin J Brown, our photographer. Paula’s now retired in North Carolina, Geoffrey is a member of the House of Keys on the Isle of Man and Austin sadly passed away in May 2004 having got through thousands of rolls of Fujichrome Provia 100 on behalf of the magazine. That summer, all four team members attended the PFA Rally at Cranfield, all of us camping in order to save a bit of money and get the full PFA experience.
The charismatic Ivan Shaw was launching the Europa, a great handling aeroplane that was capable of providing a challenge or three when it came to getting it off of or back onto the ground. Along with FLYER’s then technical editor, Miles McCallum, I figured that building the FLYER Europa would be a good idea. It may have been, and it resulted in a mostly enjoyable experience with foam cores and composites than I’d imagined, but it didn’t result in an aeroplane. We sold the kit and the Europa eventually flew, just not in our hands.
Somehow we managed to stay in business (it was all a little less structured in those days), we introduced free landing fees, brought out the annual Learn to Fly Guide and got into exhibitions, successfully building a pan European series of events called Pilot Careers Live. Although as you might imagine, they’re currently not running!
Over the past 26 years there have been a few sad times, a few challenging times, notably 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, but the overriding experience has been one of amazing aeroplanes, amazing flying, and above all amazing people.
We’ve also seen a lot of change. To print the magazine we used to send page film to the printers via something called Red Star, a sort of train-based parcel service; we launched our first (and now somewhat embarrassing website – you can still see pages from 1997 on the web’s ‘WayBack’ machine) and gradually the digital world seeped into the publishing business, which brings us in an oversimplified leap to the current day and more importantly the future.
For all publishers the newsstand has been in gradual decline for at least 10 years. COVID-19 pretty much stopped it in its tracks, all publishers have seen sudden and dramatic reductions in sales down to unimaginable levels. For us that wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t serving the needs of readers, advertisers or indeed us the publishers. Personally I think changing habits will mean that we won’t see a quick recovery of newsstand habits, so we took the decision to go purely digital from this, the July issue. But that one momentous change wasn’t enough, more was needed, so we decided to make the new digital FLYER available to anyone. Free of charge. Alongside that we’ve created The FLYER Club. Membership’s £2.50 a month (payable quarterly), and members will get not only the magazine, but access to the free landing fees, exclusive content, early access to weather briefings, exclusive webinars and much more that we’ll be adding over the next few months.
There are a few things that are better in print than digital, and yes we’re sad about the loss of the print magazine, but there are many things that you can do with digital that just aren’t possible with paper and we’re hugely excited by the world of digital publishing that’s opening up ahead of us.
In many ways it feels like the adrenaline fuelled days of 1994 – we’re loving the challenge of live streaming, of creating videos and podcasts, of bringing you content in ways that are a pleasure to consume on desktop or mobile, and perhaps best of all of creating The FLYER Club, a new type of virtual organisation that will bring you – the past, current and future flyer – something very special.
