I think you may have some choices in Virginia!
Rest assured that what you are experiencing is very normal. It’s not really that you need someone to teach you how to get a noise out of your flute, but that you–your body, your muscles–need to discover how to get a noise out of your flute.
There is a lot that has to come together to make that noise. It’s not just a matter of pressing keys, like on a piano, or covering holes, like whistle. Your FACE is actually very much involved in making that flute noise, and it has to learn what to do.
Right now, your body doesn’t know how to do it. But, if you keep at it bit by bit, every day, you will begin to learn and put it all together.
It’s mostly a matter of trial and error. You’ll accidentally or on purpose do something that sounds better, and you work on that until it happens all the time. If you’re so fortunate as to find a teacher . . . well, that’s a good thing because he or she can save you a lot of time.
The advice I got was that it would take 3 months to get a halfway decent sound out of my flute, and 6 before I could get it when I wanted it (most of the time). That was fairly accurate. Being that you play an instrument already, you might take less time.
Just be patient with yourself and with the instrument. You’ll discover quickly that it’s not necessary to huff and puff, and that there really isn’t a lot of excess effort required.
Do you mouth whistle? If you do, and if you remember learning, you might recall that you blew and blew and blew without anything happening. Then, you accidentally made a noise and tried to make it again. After working at it, you discovered how to whistle and that it wasn’t really difficult at all–all that huffing and puffing wasn’t necessary. What was necessary was the just-right combination of mouth shape, air flow, tongue position, and everything else that can’t be described. (You can see this excess effort in small children who are trying to whistle.)
It’s much the same with the flute.