by Mark R. Baker
President & CEO Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association
I’ve just finished my first year as AOPA president. And what a year it’s been. I arrived with a pretty big to do list. I wanted to understand what matters to our members. Then I wanted to get back to our core competencies and align our resources with your needs. Next, I wanted to engage more with our members. And finally, I wanted to position AOPA to move toward the future. So, how did we do?
From day one, I’ve traveled the country talking to members—it’s one of my very favorite parts of the job—and a few key themes have emerged. You’re worried about the rising cost of flying; when your freedom to fly is threatened, you want AOPA to act decisively on your behalf; and you don’t want to be burdened with expensive or excessive regulations.
I put those priorities at the heart of our decision making process, and they’ve guided us to some important victories in the past year. We got the FAA to back away from a policy that would have required thousands of pilots to go through expensive and intrusive testing for sleep apnea. And we brought a halt to the unwarranted stops and searches of domestic general aviation flights by Customs and Border Protection. And we’re still fighting the biggest issue of all—third class medical reform.
I also really wanted to reset AOPA itself, so our priorities align with yours. We started with a careful evaluation of all our programs and people. Based on what we found, we eliminated some positions, refocused on our core competencies, and cut our expenses to the lowest level since 2006.
Then it was time to turn our attention to increasing engagement. We traded our national convention for a series of regional AOPA Fly-Ins—seven in all for 2014. Attendance is four to five times what we expected and members keep telling us how happy they are to see AOPA at their airports. These events help build the sense of community at airports. That’s good for engagement today and it’s an important part of my last agenda item—moving to the future.
To keep general aviation viable, we’ve got to increase GA activity. So over the past year we’ve begun building a comprehensive program to get people flying.
We’re welcoming back lapsed pilots with the Rusty Pilots program—more than 1,700 people have already signed up. Through the AOPA Flying Club Initiative, we’re making it easy to find or start a club near you. And our Reimagined Aircraft experiment is designed to bring down the cost of flying to about $65 an hour, including fuel.
All in all, I think we’ve accomplished a lot in this first year—and it’s just a beginning. I can’t wait to see what we can achieve in year two.
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